by Max Candee
They stared at me.
Had I made a sound to alert them? Could they smell me? No, Uncle Misha had been right. They simply sensed me. No hiding spot would keep me safe.
One of the ghosts took a step closer. Then another step. Except he didn’t actually step. His legs didn’t move; he floated. In the faint light, they both glowed as if lit with some inner light. Another floating step closer. The second ghost followed.
I had to do something. Something other than pressing my face into the dirt and shaking with fear. I thought over all the tricks that Egor had taught me. Would any of them help me now? I had no bones with which to make a ward. I didn’t dare call the golem, even if I had a proper pool to call him from. Using Egor’s dagger meant killing them — dissolving them, whatever — and that seemed way too cruel. And what good would Nimble Feet be against ghosts who could float?
But wait! Maybe Nimble Feet was the answer. What was it if not stealth? Maybe I could use the shadow to hide myself…
I checked the ghosts again. They were closer still. But they seemed uncertain. I closed my eyes, trying to push back the panic that was constricting my throat. I was exhausted. But this wasn’t the time to give in, and I wouldn’t give in. Egor had warned me not to let the ghosts touch me. I had to hide in a place they wouldn’t be able to reach.
I summoned my magic. It boiled in my stomach, heated my chest, and was ready to burst out of every pore. No, that wasn’t good. I had to control it or I’d start blasting rays of energy all over the forest. The shadow in my heart chittered happily. It loved it when I lost control. That gave it power. The more people I harmed, the stronger it became.
The ghosts floated closer. Their arms were stretched out, hands reaching for me. Bottomless black eyes mesmerized me.
Hide! I had to hide! Dark fluttering wings tickled my insides. I suddenly knew what to do. I wrapped my energy around the shadow … that is, I infused the shadow with my own magic. In my mind’s eye, I could see the sparkly blue energy spreading through the darkness that lived in my heart, clinging to it like a sticky cobweb. Then I forced the magic into every cell in my body. The shadow went with it. My skin tingled. The hair on my arms and neck stood on end. A dark haze covered my eyes, and my hearing became muffled as if I’d just plunged underwater.
The shadow now covered me from head to toe. I dared to peek at the ghosts again. They’d stopped no more than an arm’s length away. The first one cocked his head as if confused. I shivered. The ghost stuck his transparent face into the air above my hiding spot. His fingers made fists in the empty air above my head. The grasses blew right threw him. Behind him, the second ghost opened his mouth and let out a long, sad wail. They were looking for me. I held on tightly to the shadow that hid me, wondering how much magic I was using, if I was growing older with each passing moment.
Then the ghosts floated away. Evidently, they thought I had vanished. And maybe I had. Maybe vanishing or invisibility wasn’t anything more than hiding under a shadow. I didn’t know, but now wasn’t the time to ponder things like that.
I tucked the magic and shadow around me like a cloak and ran. I ignored the thirst that stuck my tongue to the roof of my mouth. I ran up hills and down ravines. I tore through brambles and sloshed through streams. The moon crested the treetops, and still I ran, safe in my invisibility.
Then, exhausted, I fell to the ground, paralyzed by gulping gasps. I felt as if I’d never have enough air. I had dropped my magic cover some time ago, and my shadow had retreated back inside me. I had no strength to keep them up. Every ghost in Siberia could find me now.
And I didn’t care. I had to rest. I had to…
Sleep overcame me.
Chapter 10
Dear Diary,
I’m only just learning that family is a tricky thing. I never really had a family before. I have Uncle Misha, but I always knew he isn’t my real uncle. And then there are Sisters Daphne and Constance in Geneva. But they aren’t really sisters either.
I wonder why we give family titles like “Uncle” and “Sister” to people who aren’t related to us. Is it because, somewhere deep inside, we have a burning need to build a family around us even when there is none?
* * *
The night was so black under the trees that when I awoke, I thought I was blind. I passed my hand in front of my eyes and could barely see the outline of my fingers. My throat ached for water. I had only a little left in my pack and I drank it all down. I’d need to find a stream soon.
For several long minutes, I sat in the darkness, listening to the night shift and chirp around me. I was afraid to move. What if the ghosts were still nearby? But the only way I could save my friends and find my father was to get to Baba Yaga — and I wouldn’t do that by sitting around.
But I had no idea how to get to Baba Yaga’s house. Uncle Misha had pointed me in the general direction, and I had hoped that the slope of the mountain would take me there. Now I might as well have been blindfolded and spun around a hundred times. Even in the daylight, I’d have no idea which way to go.
Then I remembered Squire. I fumbled in my pack and found him still wrapped in the soft cloth. With little effort — my magic came easier now — I summoned a flame and blew it on him.
Squire exploded to life. He doubled in size and long black hairs popped out of his knuckles. He stretched his fingers, bobbed around for a bit, and dove for the tickle. The flame went off, leaving us in the darkness.
“Stop that!” I giggled, and batted him away from my ribs. My voice was too loud in the quiet forest. “Stop it!” I said again, this time in a harsh whisper.
Squire backed up and floated before me, a faint shade in the black forest. He seemed a bit droopy, sad maybe. I hadn’t taken the time to be with him lately.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “It’s just that there are dangers around here and we need to be quiet.”
Squire bobbed in understanding.
“You once said that you had a mate, the left hand to your right.”
Squire nodded again.
“Did you both live with Baba Yaga?”
Another bob, this one more hesitant.
“Does she live near here? Can you show me the way?”
Squire dove into my backpack. I couldn’t believe it. Was he hiding? Squire had faced the Montmorencys and their wicked partners with me. He’d fought the Horseman’s wolves. I’d never seen him afraid of anything.
“Come out,” I whispered. “I know you’re scared, but this is important.”
Squire peeked out of the bag.
“I need you, Squire. No one else can help me now. Will you show me the way to my grandmother’s house?”
If Squire had shoulders to straighten, he’d have straightened them then. If he had lungs, he’d have taken a deep breath. Since he had neither of those, he just bobbed once and took off into the darkness.
“Wait,” I called. “I can’t see you.” Quickly, I searched the bundle that Uncle Misha had given me. It was full of odd bits and pieces, including stones, bones and yarn — tools with which to make a ward. (If only I had thought to look in the bundle when I’d been confronted by the two ghosts.) Also in the package was — yes! A luster beetle. I gave it a shake. It jittered in my hand; then its rear lit up, filling the night with its soft green light.
Squire bounced in the air a few paces ahead. He beckoned with one finger, and I followed.
I didn’t know how Squire could find his way in the darkness, but he did. We walked for what seemed like hours, but the sky was still dark when we came upon a fence.
A fence in the middle of a wild Siberian forest was odd enough. A fence with skulls atop each post was downright scary.
Squire bobbed up and down. I couldn’t tell whether he was excited to go on or trembling and wanting to run away. But I wasn’t ready to do either.
I held the luster beetle up to examine one of the skulls.
Its black eyeholes suddenly blazed to life. I jumped back and fell against a tree.
Blue fire burned from the skull’s eyes, reminding me of a jack-o-lantern. Then one by one, the skulls lit up along the fence, like the guiding lights on a runway. They wound through the trees to a rickety old gate.
“I think we found it,” I said.
Squire hid in the crook of my arm.
I didn’t know what we’d find inside the house, and I decided that Squire would be safer in my pack for now. “Go to sleep, Squire,” I said, and he fell into my hand, once again becoming nothing more than a small stone sculpture. I tucked him in my bag and followed the line of glowing skulls to the gate. The fiery eyes seemed to track my movements, and a shiver ran up my spine. I tried not to look at the one fence post, right next to the gate, that didn’t have a skull.
At the gate, I got the first glimpse of the house. It was tall and bent, like a witch’s hat. Appropriate, I supposed. A large porch wrapped around the front and side. On the porch jostled an old rocking chair. It swayed back and forth, back and forth, with a faint creaking of boards. But no one was sitting in it. Beside the chair, a big black-and-white cat washed a paw and watched me. The gardens around the porch were full of dead bushes and headless stalks. The windows were dark and dirty. In the faint glow of the skull torches, they shone like large eyes.
Then I noticed something weird: There was a path leading right up to the house, but there were no steps up to the porch and no door. How were you supposed to get in? I remembered Lauraleigh telling me how Baba Yaga was known to be very private. Apparently, she really did dislike visitors, since she didn’t leave a door for them.
Well, that was just too bad for her. Now that I’d made it this far, I wasn’t going to chicken out at the last minute. But I hesitated. Lauraleigh had also said that Baba Yaga didn’t like impolite people. Surely it was impolite to just walk up to a house with no door. I couldn’t forget that empty fencepost. It felt like it was burning a hole in the back of my head, as if even without a skull, it were glaring at me the hardest.
As I looked closer, I saw that the house was definitely standing on two stilt-like things: chicken legs! Why did Baba Yaga have them? And then I remembered Uncle Misha mentioning the possibility that my grandmother had moved.
Well, it’s not as if there were a lot of houses around here. She couldn’t have just gone to a real estate agent to find a new place to live. And why would she, when she had everything she needed here and a house on feet? Surely she had enough power to make it walk around if she wanted?
I looked more closely at the feet. In the blue light of the skulls, I thought I saw one of them shiver as if from the night chill.
I bit my lip, glancing back up at the porch. What I was thinking of doing might be dangerous. But Baba Yaga would find out I was here soon enough, and I might as well get it over with. The black-and-white hare on the porch looked back at me.
Wait. Hadn’t it been a cat a moment ago?
It was my turn to shiver. There was a lot of magic in this place. I could feel its low hum. Who knew what might happen next? It was time to try something.
I stared at the house’s legs and whispered the formula that floated up from my memory. “Little house, turn your front to me and your back to the forest.” It sounded like something I’d picked up from one of Uncle Misha’s picture books when I was small.
At first, nothing happened, and I thought I’d have to try something else — or risk walking up to the house after all. But then there was a great creak, and slowly the house began to rise up into the air. The two chicken legs were unbending. They seemed to stretch out. Then with what looked like tiny little dance steps, they started to move, slowly turning the house around.
It was one of the weirdest things I had ever seen, and the last couple of months had set the bar for that pretty high.
Another wall of the house came into view, looking just like the one I’d seen, except without a rocking chair. And then the front turned toward me, and the chicken legs set themselves down with a heavy whomp. A set of stairs lined up perfectly with the path and led right up to a door.
The cat — wait, hadn’t it just been a hare? — slunk around the corner and looked at me mockingly. From inside the house, I heard muffled cheering and applause.
Swallowing hard, I walked up the path, hoping I looked more confident than I felt. When I reached the stairs, there was another burst of applause. What was going on? Was this one of Baba Yaga’s jokes or something? I hadn’t heard that she had much of a sense of humor, but maybe she’d put an enchantment on the house to congratulate people who had made it this far before she killed them. That sounded like what I imagined about her.
The front door was open a crack. I knocked and pushed it wide, just as the sky lightened. Dawn comes quickly in the forest. The skulls winked out, leaving the porch lit by the pink glow of sunrise. The light barely filtered inside, though, and the room I walked into was dark, until another skull sputtered to life in the corner. I studied the cluttered room.
It was furnished with pieces of dark wood, a table, a chair by the fire, and several chests, some open and spilling out blankets and clothes. Large bunches of herbs hung from nails on the beams overhead. Every available space was covered with trinkets, potion bottles, jars of herbs, and other oddities. I saw skulls of large and small animals, dolls fashioned from sticks and yarn, a statue of a fat man and another of two thin women back to back.
But what really shocked me were the hands. They were everywhere! Just like Squire, they were animated and they floated in the air, doing all kinds of chores. One hand was grinding dried herbs in a mortar. Another was dusting a shelf of trinkets. A third was stoking the fire, and two others were working together to knit a long scarf.
None of them paid me any attention, so I followed the sounds of voices into another room. This one was a kitchen, with a large hearth along one wall and a worn butcher block in the center. The block seemed dark with old blood. In here, more hands were washing dishes, stirring a pot of stew that was hanging on a hook over the fire, and chopping vegetables.
I tiptoed through the kitchen; as before, none of the hands bothered me. I went through another door. This one opened into a dark bedroom that smelled musty and sweet as if someone had been burning herbs in the fireplace.
I’d found the source of the voices. On a dresser sat an enormous flat-screen TV — one of those new, curved types. Its flickering lit the room. At that moment, a contestant on a game show won the grand prize and the audience burst into applause. I blinked in the bright light and tried to see the rest of the room. Other than the TV, it was occupied by the biggest bed I’d ever seen, piled high with mismatched blankets. Perched in the middle of the bed was a wizened old woman with her hair in curlers. She had sunken, wrinkled cheeks and a huge cone of a nose. Her teeth seemed too big for her mouth and oddly gray.
“It’s about time you got here, girl,” Baba Yaga said. “Don’t just stand there gaping like a ninny. Make yourself useful. Fetch us some tea.”
Chapter 11
Dear Diary,
My grandmother is one of the most powerful witches in the world. She’s also undoubtedly the weirdest person I’ve ever met. I don’t think she has a heart. She let her own flesh and blood die in childbirth in a bear’s den. She may have killed many girls abducted by the Montmorencys and the Black Horseman around the world. And she kidnapped my father. On top of all that, her house is very strange. The main furnishing is a massive TV that’s bigger than anything I ever saw back in Geneva. I certainly didn’t expect to find that in a little forest cabin on chicken legs. My grandmother is from another world. So how is she connected to the world I used to know? Nothing about her makes any sense to me.
Then again, she is my grandmother, and I have to deal with her to learn about my family secrets and save my father.
Maybe she can even teach me some magic. Just so long as that doesn’t make me as weird as she is!
* * *
I stood frozen in place in front of my grandmother. I had often tried to imagine our mee
ting, but not in my wildest dreams had I ever pictured such a casual greeting from her. Fetch us some tea? Who greeted a granddaughter she’d never seen before like that?
On the other hand, at least she was coming across as somewhat friendly and almost bordering on normal. For a woman who’d chased her only daughter off to have a baby in the wilderness, surrounded by bears, she was being … unexpectedly nice. Well, not nice exactly, but I had suspected, based on movies and books, that it would be something like this — kids making tea for the older people in the family. It was as though she had accepted me as her granddaughter so quickly that she expected us to take on our normal roles at once.
She looked as if she were centuries old, and she didn’t seem very healthy at all. Her face was drawn and sunken; her body was thin and spindly. She did seem in need of a granddaughter to look after her and help out. Maybe even the most powerful magic in the world wasn’t enough in the end? Maybe she was regretting her treatment of my mother and father?
After a second of contemplation, I decided to play along.
“Hello, Granny!” I chirped. Since I’d never been here before, though, it was impossible to play house with Baba Yaga without getting some clarification. “Where’s your kettle?”
She puffed her lips, clearly annoyed. “Go into the kitchen and ask the hands. There should be a pair in there that isn’t busy.”
I headed for the kitchen and looked at the disembodied hands scuttling around the place. A pair was washing dishes in the sink. Another pair was dusting. The final pair was tidying the counter, not doing anything serious, it seemed.
“Hello,” I said to them, not sure where to look. I had never seen more than one disembodied hand at a time before, and I didn’t know if they’d take to me as quickly as Squire had. “I’m Anna Sophia.” One hand reached out and I shook it. This was very odd. “Would you mind making some tea for my grandmother and me?”
