Witch Way Did He Go?

by Dakota Cassidy

  I don’t know if I always knew or if I even believed Baba could still hear me, now that I was no longer a witch, but maybe I had a feeling deep down that she’d kept tabs on me since I’d been booted from the coven.

  Maybe to monitor whether I was trying to find a way to retrieve my powers, or maybe even just because at one time, I’d meant something to the coven—to her.

  I told myself on many occasions I didn’t care. She’d done her job. I can’t fault her there, I suppose. Sometimes your imperious leader has to make choices that aren’t always favorable but for the greater good.

  Though, I can’t say how leaving me high and dry after I’d shown compassion to the small child of a monster was the greater good, but whatever. I broke a rule, and she made me pay. End of story.

  Still, Baba was a decent being. She ruled with an iron fist, but she had a heart, and it was that heart that left me wondering if she still listened for me, in spite of the coven rules.

  But in the process of cracking, I no longer cared if she listened because she fretted over me, and I didn’t care about the consequences of calling her out. Baba was a conduit. She, or someone she knew, could tell me what had happened to Win. That was all I cared about.

  I was at straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back stage of the game. I had nothing left to lose and more determination than good sense.

  Closing my eyes, I inhaled deeply and screamed, “Baaaba Yaaaga! I, Stephania Cartwright, summon thee to this realm—now!”

  When she appeared before me, in all her ’80s regalia, the scent of Love’s Baby Soft in the air, her signature green smoke fanning out behind her, I found out, apparently, she did still hear me.

  Her beautiful eyes met mine for the first time in a long time—and they weren’t the kind that said, “Hey, kid. How ya been?”

  No. In fact, they were flashing and intense, but remember, I’d lost all self-control at this point, and I didn’t care how I was received by the great and powerful BY.

  I only cared that she give me what I wanted, and I wanted to know where Win was before it was too late. I couldn’t let it be too late, and if it was too late, I needed to know he’d had safe passage.

  “Stephania, as you well know by coven law, after a shunning, you’re not supposed to contact me,” she said, her voice stern as she fluffed her Madonna-like skirt and smoothed her bi-level hair back from her ever-youthful face.

  The neon bangle bracelets she wore clanked when she crossed her arms under her breasts and stared me down.

  I don’t know if you recall, but Baba is a lover of all things ’80s—clothes, music, hair. Her outfits were outrageous, despite the fact that she was gorgeous in them.

  “I know,” I seethed, lifting my chin to stare defiantly at her. I think when you go kaplooey the way I did, you go through several stages leading up to total bananapants, and this was the angry-with-the-world-right-before-the-total-bananapants stage. “And I don’t give a witches broom. I need your help, and I need it now. No. I take that back. I demand it now!”

  “Stevie!” both Arkady and Bel admonished in unison.

  I stomped my foot (yep, you read that right), tightening my jaw. “Don’t you Stevie me, you two! Don’t you dare! I’m at my wit’s end. I can’t take anymore! I can’t bear the idea that we don’t know for sure if Win’s really gone. I want confirmation, and I want it now!”

  Baba circled me, eyeballing me with eyes of fire and a mouth that thinned until it almost disappeared. “How dare you ask that of me, Stephania,” she said, her tone cool with inconvenience.

  So here’s the part where, I if I hadn’t lost it before, I totally lost my shiznit. Lost it in ten different ways.

  “How dare I? How dare I ask you for something?” I bellowed, making her crazy hair blow upward from the force of my screech. “How dare you take everything I’ve ever loved away from me without a single word! How dare you leave me stranded as though I never existed! Well, look at me now, Baba!” I spread my arms wide to encompass the room. “I sure bounced back, didn’t I? And I’m not going to let anyone take my life again. You owe me, and I think somewhere in that cold, black heart of yours, you know you do. You know it!”

  “Stevie!” Belfry cried as Whiskey, my little traitor, rubbed his head against Baba’s leg, looking for love. “Stop! Stop right now!”

  Baba reached down and ran a slender hand over Whiskey’s head, her eyes zeroing in on my familiar. “Belfry? How is it you’ve lost control of your witch?”

  “His witch?” I roared, clenching my fists to keep from clocking her in the nose. “I’m not a witch anymore, thanks to you, or this little summoning wouldn’t be happening at all! I’d have located Win all on my own!”

  Almost immediately, Baba’s eyes softened and her head cocked in curiosity. “You mean the delicious British fellow? That Win?”

  Baba had paid me a visit a while back, and she’d met Win, who she’d fawned over and been utterly delightful to, and at the time, it made me want to hack up my lunch. But that she remembered him gave her a frame of reference.

  I needed her to have a frame of reference, to understand this was no small request on my part. I wasn’t asking her to save just anyone because I’m an empathetic fool and love a happy ending. This was Win.

  I simmered down, but only enough to say, “Yes. That’s the one.”

  Smiling absently as though she were recalling a happy memory, she gazed at me. “And what’s happened to your Win, Stephania?”

  My lips thinned while ugly thoughts of holding her down and forcing her to help me raced through my head. “I don’t know, but I need your help to find out. I just want to know he’s safe. I need to know if he went to the other side.”

  She gave me a blank look, the one that said I had a lot of nerve, her unlined face passive. “And how do you propose I do that?”

  I openly gaped at her, my anger returning, my stomach rolling. “You know exactly how to do that, Baba. There’s a rumor going around in the afterlife that he’s crossed. I need to know for certain if that’s true.”

  She stared at me some more, her gorgeous eyes scanning me from head to toe. “I assume he’s been with you since my last visit? All this time, Stephania? You’ve grown close?”

  Tucking my arms under my breasts, I suddenly felt self-conscious. Even in ’80s garb, Baba was beautiful, and I looked like a roughed-up, greasy, unwashed hag. “We have…” I muttered, my eyes falling to the floor, my bravado faltering.

  “Isn’t crossing into the light what one does when they make a choice to leave their appointed plane?”

  “You know that’s what happens. But let me explain. Please listen to me, and you’ll understand why I summoned you.”

  So I explained, in the best way I knew how, and as she listened to me, her perfect face never moving an inch, I calmed a bit.

  And I told her everything, complete honesty. I told her my fear that he’d decided to plane hop and possibly body surf, something I know she wholly disapproved of. I told her about the strange messages we didn’t understand. I told her what Arkady had heard.

  All of it.

  When I was done, she lifted a hand to brush the hair from my face, but she shook her head. “You know if I locate him, that would be using magic for personal gain, Stephania, don’t you? It’s not allowed.”

  Instantly, my anxiety, ugly and thick, bubbled to the surface again. I batted her intrusive hand from my face, my breaths coming in choppy pants as my one last hope began to fade.

  “Please! I’m begging you, Baba Yaga.”

  She reached out again, her face muted in sympathy. “Sweet girl—”

  “Please!” I cried, pushing her away.

  “Stephania,” she began, but I wasn’t letting her get away so easily.

  Fear and hopelessness began to ratchet up, notch after notch, clawing at me as I burst at the seams. “Please, please don’t take this one thing away from me! Everything has been taken away! Everything! Do you hear me? I lost everything when you sent me awa
y!” I screamed, the pressure in my chest, the merciless headache pounding in my temples, all lent to this desperation I couldn’t contain.

  I couldn’t bottle it up anymore.

  Baba looked at me, her sharp eyes scanning my face. “Stephania—”

  “No!” I belted out the word, so loud, the pictures on the wall rattled as I shook my head back and forth, a river of tears coursing down my face. “No, no, no! I rebuilt my life, and I did that all by myself when you shipped me off as though I were some dirty secret you had to hide, and then Win found me. He saved me! He did that! He gave me everything, everything I have today. We did this together, as a team. We’re a team,” I sobbed hoarsely, so distraught, I almost doubled over.

  “Stevie,” Bel soothed in my ear. “Please. Now I’m begging you. Please calm down. This can’t be good for you. Please, please, sweet girl.”

  I know my eyes were wild. I know my movements were shaky and disjointed. I know I looked like a stark-raving lunatic. But I still didn’t care. I didn’t give a wit about how I looked or sounded. I just wanted to know where Win was. I wanted Win back. However I could have him, I needed Win, and I would not be turned away.

  I began to pace, feeling the frantic rise and fall of my breathing making me dizzy, but I couldn’t stop. If I stopped, I didn’t know if I could ever move again.

  “Malutka, my beautiful, kind malutka, I cannot bear this. I cannot bear your suffering. I, too, beg you. Please. Please, you must stop,” he whispered. “Belfry is right. This is not good for you. You will make yourself sick.”

  “I don’t care, Arkady! Don’t you see, I don’t care! What’s not good for me is being without Win! Without all of us—together. You, me, Belfry, Whiskey, Strike and Win. I won’t do it. I won’t lose him and this life we’ve created if he didn’t cross over! Do you hear me? So I’ll do whatever you want, whatever you say—but don’t you dare tell me no, Baba Yaga!” I sneered at her, shaking a finger under her nose as tears raced down my cheeks. “Don’t you dare let everything be taken from me again! I don’t want to hear that magic isn’t for personal gain. I never, ever once used my magic for anything but what it was intended, and still you took it all away! I personally gained nothing from this gig!”

  “Malutka—”

  But I whipped a hand upward to silence him, my breathing ragged. “Now, I don’t care about your stupid rules. I don’t care what the council says. I. Don’t. Care! I know you can tell me where he is, and if he’s safe. I know you can find him with a location spell. It’s a simple spell. Tell me where he is, Baba, and I’ll take care of the rest. I’ll never ask you for a single thing again if you tell me where Win is!”

  In my frantic pacing, I tripped over my exhausted feet and fell, crumpled as though I were boneless, my pajamas, dirty from the rain, twisting around my legs, but when Baba reached out to help me up, I rose to my knees and grabbed her wrist.

  And as my tears fell, I whispered raggedly, “Please. I just need to know if he’s okay. If he’s safe. If it means he crossed into the light…I’ll accept that as our fate, but I need to know!”

  Baba knelt down next to me, lifting my chin with one hand while latching onto the hand I used to hold her wrist, anchoring me. Her strength real, flowing through me like a warm balm.

  “You’re the most selfless being I know, Stephania,” she said softly, hauling me upward and setting me from her. “Only you would ask that this lovely man’s well-being come before yours. That you would let him go, if that’s what made him happy, only enforces my instincts about you. You’re all the things everyone should aspire to be. The coven misses you. I miss you. But for now…because it has to be this way, because you can’t come back, I want to give this to you. Because you’re right—you’re owed a debt.”

  “Give this to me?” I didn’t understand. Were we on to find Win or not? “I don’t understand…”

  But she didn’t answer me directly. “Belfry!” she called, snapping her fingers and pointing to my shoulder, indicating he should land there. “Take care of our girl, would you please? She’ll need you now more than ever.”

  Almost the second she spoke so cryptically, Baba snapped her fingers again—and our living room was no more.

  Everything tilted, went about as sideways as it gets before it righted itself.

  “Stevie?” Bel whispered. “Where are we?”

  “Malutka? What is this?”

  As our surroundings became clearer, as the fuzzy outlines of our location sharpened, I blinked as I began to understand.

  “A hospital. We’re in the ICU unit of a hospital.”

  Chapter 12

  I stood rooted to the white floor, still in my stinky pajamas with my hoodie tied around my waist, and fuzzy slippers on my feet, giving the quiet corridor a good once-over.

  There was a long stretch of pale green hallway, dimly lit for the evening. Some hushed conversation down the hall somewhere was happening, but for the most part, it was quiet. Machines beeped and hissed, and there was a light glow in each of the rooms from heart monitors.

  Hospital. We were definitely in the hospital. But where? It sure didn’t look like Eb Falls General. I’d been to the hospital several times since I’d moved back, and it didn’t look like this at all. The halls were wider, the windows both wider and taller. When I looked out at a row of them, spanning the right wall, all I saw was lights from a city. But it certainly wasn’t Eb Falls, or even Seattle.

  Bel tucked himself against my ear as I oriented myself. “I don’t get what just happened or where we are, Boss.”

  Noting a sign for a bathroom just ahead of us, on quick feet, I made a break for it and ducked inside, locking the door. I headed for the mirror, my state of undress sinking in as I shook my head. “I don’t get it, either.”

  Bel hopped to the pristine white sink and looked up at me. “Okay, so BY, that crusty old hen, said she owed you. In the history of witches, I’ve never heard that phrase uttered. I don’t know why she suddenly decided she owed you, but whatever. She said she wanted to give this to you. What exactly is this?”

  My head spun as I flipped on the cold-water tap and ran my fingers under the faucet to splash some water on my stinging, swollen eyes. “Well, this means one of two things. Either Win is here…or she screwed up royally and dumped us on the wrong floor and we’re really supposed to be in the psyche ward.”

  “Malutka, listen to Arkady. I see how she look at you, your Baba Yaga. She does not do this with malice. Her heart is pure. She do something nice. This is something nice.”

  Belfry snorted. “I’m not even going to get into the purity of BY, but wow, Stevie B… Way to give our former leader some H-E-double-hockey-sticks. You really went for it, kiddo.”

  The magnitude of what I’d done, what I’d said, hit me then. When I was in the middle of reaming BY a new one, when I was begging and scraping, I never once stopped to think about how far I’d gone because for the thousandth time, I didn’t care. I had nothing to lose.

  Now, looking at my reflection, wild-eyed and greasy-haired, gave me pause. Big, big pause. “I feel like I’m going to pay for that somewhere down the road. But I didn’t care. I guess I still don’t care. But I sort of lost it, and I’m sorry you guys had to see that.”

  “Oh, you lose it all right. You lose it big. But it is okey-doke. You were tiger, malutka. You give me great pride feeling in my chest.”

  My cheeks went hot red. “I know. I know. But sometimes the reward is greater than the risk.”

  We all snickered together but then I sobered. “So BY’s reasons for granting me this aside…we’re here. She didn’t do this without reason. She sent us here, to an ICU unit. BY doesn’t make mistakes. So, we need to figure out precisely what this means. We need a plan, guys.”

  “Oh, thank goddess you’re talking plans, Boss. Thought I’d lost ya there.”

  I thought he had, too. “Not a chance.”

  “Okay, Arkady ready for plan. Let us make plan.”

  As I spla
shed my face again and dried my hands, I pondered. “So, the obvious answer to why we’re here is, Win’s here somewhere, too. The answer to why Win’s here is also obvious. He’s successfully body hopped into a dying body. Do we agree?”

  “He would have to have a body to be in place such as this, Stevie. Arkady agree.”

  You’d think hearing that would thrill me to my marrow, but the truth was, it frightened the life out of me. If Win really was here and in a host body, one that wasn’t too damaged, he might not remember who we were. I prayed he’d remembered that he could lose everything he was seeking when he went into this crazy mission. Like his memory of us. The memory of his life’s work, the house, our adventures, everything.

  “Oh, Stevie,” Bel said on a long breath, and I knew he was thinking exactly what I’d been thinking.

  “Family!” Arkady said sharply, clapping his hands. “I know what you think, but we must not think bad thoughts. We must do first things first. We must see if Win is even here, yes? Otherwise, this is all for naught, and we need to find new path.”

  Gripping the edge of the sink, I let my head hang between my shoulders. “You’re right, Arkady. Thank you for keeping me from going off the deep end again. So yes, a little recon is necessary.” I paused and stopped obsessing over the why’s and where’s and focused on the task. “Arkady, you scope the floor. Look in each room and see if you can find him.”

  “But wait,” Belfry said, his voice distant as I’m sure he, too, pondered the million-and-one scenarios. “How will we know it’s Win? Arkady can look all he wants, but how the heck will we even know it’s him if he’s in someone else’s body, and doesn’t remember us, and we no longer know what he looks like?”

  Dang. Foiled again. But… “BY wouldn’t drop us here out of the ether if he wasn’t somewhere in this hospital. That has to be why we’re here. So we go with that until we can’t. As to knowing which body he’s in, I suggest looking at the most critical cases. If he body surfed, he’d need a host that’s on its way…er, out.”