by Hero Bowen
“Leave that. Basha will know you’ve been up here if you touch her precious curtains,” Kaleena instructed, sticking her hand through the window to show her rose-gold watch. “Clock’s ticking, little sister. Get moving.”
Nadia whirled around and ran back the way she’d come, pausing by the bedside table to put everything back the way it was. Taking a steadying breath, she looked over her shoulder to find Kaleena climbing down the ladder. Satisfied, Nadia took off out of the bedroom, the exchange made. There was no taking it back now.
In the hallway, Nadia instinctively grabbed a szabla off the wall: a slightly curved saber used by Polish hussars for centuries in cavalry clashes that rang across Europe. Basha always claimed it was the real deal and that it had been passed down through her family for generations. Nadia was no weapons expert, but she was pretty sure the Nazis would’ve had something to say if they’d found a Kaminski with a sword like this stashed away. Still, at least it looked like she’d tried to arm herself against intruders.
Wielding it clumsily, she jogged back into the kitchen.
Basha spun around, fist raised. “This is war. Before, I say yes to having Kaminski in power over stranger. But Wishmaster has gone too far this time! You fight with us, or you fight against us.”
Grace was now perched on a barstool, looking as shaken up as her favorite margarita. Even Miles, who stood awkwardly on the lip between the den and the kitchen, seemed unsettled.
“I promise to get remaining wishes for debt, but she no listen!” Basha stabbed a finger at the now-blank phone screen. “She rant and rave, and call me all names under sun! She leave us no choice. We overthrow her and put someone new in her place, like we did with Adrian. It can be done. Basha knows how.” All of a sudden, she appeared to run out of steam, staggering into the side of the island and bracing her hand against it. “We talk fighting tomorrow. We make plan then. My bones . . . they are too weary tonight. The house will protect until morning. The Wishmaster no reach us in here, as long as I stay inside.”
Grace lifted her head. “I’ll take you up to bed, Mama.”
“You are good girl. Only good girl.” Basha held out her hand for her daughter. “I have my tea. I feel better soon.” Together, they lumbered out of the kitchen, the stress of the evening evident in their identically hunched shoulders.
None of this felt right. Nadia had expected to feel relieved, and a touch guilty, after the box had been handed off. Instead, dread roiled inside her belly, along with an overwhelming heave of growing horror. Of course, she hadn’t really had a choice, but she regretted giving the wish trap to Kaleena all the same. It boiled down to that slip of wishery paper and what was written on it that the Wishmaster wanted so desperately. That was the cause of Nadia’s internal upheaval, because it meant this wasn’t about a wish trap at all.
“Nice sword. Is a certain somebody up there with her head missing?” Miles asked, walking up to her and eyeing the saber.
Nadia blinked absently. “Sorry. I picked it up on the way. Seems like overkill now that I’m looking at it.” She set the saber against the nearest barstool.
“You okay?” He put his hand on her shoulder. “You were definitely checked out for a while there.”
“Better than having to listen to my mom serenade you.”
He laughed, but it sounded like the kind of chuckle someone made with a gun to their head. “So, are we good to go? Is she—”
Nadia put a stern finger to her lips. “Not here. Follow me.” Leading the way, she took him up to the guest bedroom, wincing as she passed Basha’s closed door. From within, she heard Grace singing softly in the language of the motherland. Basha had to be feeling worse than Nadia thought, if she’d asked Grace to sing.
Pressing on, Nadia didn’t stop until she and Miles were inside the guest bathroom. There, she shut the door and turned on the shower, then settled down onto the closed toilet lid.
“Do you need some alone time?” Miles asked hesitantly, looking perplexed.
She rolled her head in her hands, too nervous about what she’d done to play into his banter. “Can you sense where Kaleena is right now?”
“Uh, not really, no,” he replied after taking a moment to put out his feelers. “There’s, like, a tiny bit of Marco but not much Polo.”
Nadia’s head shot up. “Be more specific, please. My head’s about to explode.”
“Feels like she’s back in the car. Farther away, maybe.” He leaned up against the bathroom counter. “Not close at all, if that’s what’s got you freaked.”
Nadia unleashed a sigh of relief so intense it made her ears pop. “Thank God for that.”
“So, I’m not the only one feeling like I ate bad shrimp.” Miles fanned himself as the bathroom started to steam from the running hot water. “That was some ridiculous shit, Nads. Kaleena never mentioned she’d be bringing her own pyros. Gave me some nasty flashbacks, man. I almost got third-degree burns when a fire jet thing went off too early once while I was onstage. My faux leather jacket starts bubbling, right, and I have to throw it off before it melts into me. The fans just thought it was part of the show.”
He’d gone and called her “Nads” again, but she figured the slipup was just due to nerves, and she found it didn’t annoy her as much as it had before.
Nadia leaned back against the toilet tank. “For all that time we spent planning, there were things she didn’t tell us.” She explained to Miles what had gone down in Basha’s bedroom, throwing in a detail or two about her ability and how she’d known where to find everything. “Did my body try to do anything while I was out?”
“Not really. You kind of fell asleep, snoring and everything. I wouldn’t have had you down as a heavy bass kind of snorer. More of a piccolo whistler.”
He readjusted his elbow on the bathroom counter, sending a glass jar of cotton rounds skittering off the edge and onto the floor. The smash shivered through Nadia as the shards fanned out, and her frightened gaze met Miles’s sheepish face.
“Ah, damn it!” he said. “Was that expensive? Some Polish heirloom or something? I can buy you a new one, even if I have to get it from the Smithsonian.”
Nadia shook her head slowly. “That shouldn’t have happened.”
“It was an accident, man. I didn’t mean to,” he protested boyishly. “Seriously, tell me what it cost, and I’ll get you a new one. Or one like it. Close as I can get.”
Her voice hardened. “No, you don’t understand. That shouldn’t have happened in this house. Basha’s protective shield, mechanism, spell, or whatever you want to call it doesn’t allow things to break.”
I invited her in . . . Nadia’s stomach pitched. At the window, she’d asked Kaleena if she was going to come inside. To the house, that was as good as opening the damn front door and welcoming someone inside with all the bells and whistles. A memory flash of seeing her sister put her arm partway through the window ramped up her fear. Kaleena had flaunted what she could now do, and Nadia had been too stressed about getting caught to notice.
She leaped up and raced out of the bathroom, bombing through the guest bedroom and out into the hall. Gasping for a full breath, she rushed to Basha’s room and edged the door open. Her grandmother lay curled up in the four-poster bed, a teal satin blanket draped over her and an empty cup sitting on her bedside table. Her mother, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen.
Careful not to wake the old woman, Nadia tiptoed to the window and checked the latch. The window itself had been drawn into the jamb, but the handle was turned upward in the “open” position. Kaleena must’ve closed it to create less suspicion, but that didn’t mean she’d entered the house . . . right? Nadia fervently wanted to believe that was true, but if it was, then why had Kaleena demanded to know about the key drawer and the location of the briefcase? Her heart threatened to pound right out of her chest as she thought of Basha’s tea safe and the other keys that were hidden in that drawer.
Kaleena . . . what did you do? The Wishmaster knew about Ba
sha’s evening ritual. She would’ve known where to go and what to switch out to replace Basha’s usual tea with a bark-infused version that would diminish her wish-given power. Evidently, Kaleena had made one brief stop after tricking Nadia into thinking she was heading back down the ladder.
Nadia gasped. “I left the window open. I let her in.” She steadied herself on the window ledge.
She was about to turn and run to her grandmother, to try to wake her, when Miles appeared behind her, blocking her way. “What’s going on?” He wasn’t joking anymore.
“I don’t know,” Nadia whispered. “But it’s bad. Really bad.”
Miles’s gaze darted toward the window, his nostrils flaring. “Do you smell that?”
Nadia whipped around, catching the orange flicker of strange light somewhere below the sill, near the back door of the house, joined by the faint whiff of smoke that she’d thought was one of her grandmother’s sticks of incense.
“It’s fire.” She gripped the window ledge until her knuckles whitened. “The house is on fire.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Flicking an internal switch to survival mode, Nadia concentrated on her mom and hoped her autopilot body wouldn’t throw itself out of the window. She zipped straight into Grace’s head, staying no more than a couple of seconds to find out where her mom was, before popping back into her own familiar mind.
“Miles, get my mom from the study—three doors down. Grab her and get out of the house! And call 911!” Nadia urged, immediately stepping back as she realized she’d gotten a little too close to him.
He stared at her like she had something in her teeth.
“Now, Miles!” Nadia said. Nick’s voice rang in her head: in a fire, it’s the smoke that’ll kill you first.
Miles jolted into action. “Gotcha.” He ran for the door, only to turn on the threshold. “What about you?”
“I’ll deal with my babcia.” She hurried to the bed, shaking the old woman’s narrow shoulders gently as Miles disappeared out into the hallway.
“Babcia? Babcia, you need to wake up!” Nadia gripped Basha as hard as she dared. Her grandmother might’ve had a tough-as-old-boots outer shell, but her thin arms were like matchsticks, and Nadia didn’t want to break anything.
“Babcia! Wake the hell up!” Nadia hoped a bit of bad language might coax her grandmother out of her stupor.
At least she knew Basha’s unconsciousness wasn’t because of Kaleena’s tea tampering. If Kaleena had poisoned the tea, the house would’ve made Basha throw it up, or would’ve flung the cup out of her hand. No, the tea switch had been done to disarm Basha’s wish, since that didn’t exactly harm her.
But there was only one logical reason for Kaleena to numb the protective wish—she was going to kill Basha. Her grandmother had been right. This was war, and the Wishmaster had launched the first attack.
“Wake up!” Nadia grimaced as she grabbed a glass of water from the nightstand and chucked it at Basha’s face.
The old woman’s eyelids fluttered open, her expression groggy while Nadia pulled her up into a sitting position. “What is going on, dziecko? Why you splash me? You make threat too?”
“There’s a fire, and we need to get out before it spreads,” Nadia said, ignoring the sharp-tongued comments and trying to tug her grandmother off the bed.
But Basha fought back with surprising strength in her stick-thin arms and vein-knotted hands. “That is what Wishmaster wants. If we stay in house, we will be fine. Is a trick. I no fall for it.”
Nadia tried to move her again, terrified she might wrench her grandmother’s arm out of its socket. “Kaleena found a way around your wish, Babcia. She managed to put a dose of Alexander’s Tea in your stash. The house isn’t protected anymore, and neither are you.”
Basha scooted to the end of the bed. “I must save my things,” she said, using one of the four posts to lever herself to her feet.
“There’s no point, Babcia. The wish trap in the attic isn’t there anymore.” Nadia resigned herself to telling the truth, if only to get Basha moving. “Kaleena came here to steal it, and she did. So, move your ass downstairs and get out of the house!” Regardless of the bad blood between them, she wouldn’t let her grandmother die.
Basha gaped at Nadia with watery eyes. “You betray me?”
“Let’s not argue about betrayals here,” Nadia shot back, grabbing Basha’s arm and pulling it around her shoulders. “We have to leave. Now.” She wasn’t sure if the fire had started only at the back of the house or if Kaleena had set every exit ablaze.
But Basha clung on to the bedpost, her nails digging into the wood. “I get briefcase. I rather die here than go without it.”
“Fine, but I’ll get it. You’ll take too long.” Huffing out a frustrated breath, Nadia ran to the bedside table and popped open the false bottom. That one action revealed everything about the part she’d played, but she could dwell on that later, preferably before they were incinerated.
Once she snatched up the key, she raced for the dresser, going through the motions until she was up the attic steps. She grabbed the briefcase off the dollhouse, surrounded by furniture, stacks of books, rolled-up rugs, and baskets of clothes that likely wouldn’t survive the coming inferno. Despite the bad memories, she loved this house and the treasures within it, and Kaleena was taking a wrecking ball to it all. Nadia had never wanted this outcome, but she’d given Kaleena the tinderbox to make it happen.
Shaking off dark thoughts, she barreled back down the stairs and ran over to Basha, pushing the briefcase into her grandmother’s hands.
“You know, the way you feel about this damn briefcase is exactly how I’ve felt about Nick this whole time.” Nadia couldn’t stop the bitter words from tumbling out.
Basha let go of the bedpost, both her arms wrapping around the briefcase as she looked at Nadia with sad curiosity. And then, she said six words that Nadia had never expected: “It was my mama who succeeded.”
“Pardon?” Nadia blinked, torn between dragging her grandmother out of the room and digging deeper.
Basha sighed, setting the briefcase on the bed and quickly unlocking it. At first, Nadia was going to scream at her for wasting more time—Nadia hadn’t lied about the missing wish trap, after all—but Basha seemed to be looking for something else.
“The person who came back to life, dziecko—it was me. No some forgotten member of rodzina long ago.” Her thin fingers curled around a battered journal, then she tossed it to Nadia, who only just managed to catch it. “The rest of story is in there. My mama’s diary.”
Nadia looked down at the plain brown leather, so frozen with confusion that she couldn’t think of anything to say. Was this some trick her grandmother was playing? It seemed impossible that Basha could have such a rapid change of heart.
“You might find answers in those pages,” Basha added, her voice oddly thick with emotion. “Answers to help choose right wish. Is no guarantee, but is start.”
Nadia slammed the lid back down on the briefcase and clicked the locks, then shoved the briefcase into Basha’s arms. Taking hold of her grandmother’s wrist, she tugged the old woman toward the door while she ruminated on what she could possibly say about this unexpected gift.
“Why, Babcia?” she said at last, pulling Basha down the hall. “Why didn’t you just give me this when I first asked for help?” A bittersweet choke of sadness bubbled out of Nadia’s mouth. “Do you . . . Do you understand how different things might’ve been?”
“I understand.” Basha gave a small nod, following Nadia along like a scolded child. “But I have reason. Reviving someone is dangerous—it comes at steep cost to wisher. My mama paid steep price. I no want you to sacrifice something of yourself to bring Nick back. I no bear to see you hurt in such way. But is your choice. Is no mine. Journal is . . . apology.”
“Thank you, Babcia.” Holding the journal in her hands was enough for Nadia to push aside her bitterness and blame, if only for the moment.
/> Reaching the top of the staircase, Nadia spotted Miles and Grace bursting back through the front door, hightailing it through the thick black smoke toward the stairs. Nadia shoved the journal down the waistband of her jeans.
“What the hell, Nadia?” Miles panted as he stopped at the bottom step. “We ran outside, but you didn’t come!”
“Babcia needed to get some things.” Nadia gestured to the briefcase, which Basha was readjusting in her arms.
Miles bounded up the stairs and scooped Basha over his shoulders, briefcase and all. “Problem solved.” He took a few deep breaths in the clearer air, Grace catching up behind him.
“The showroom is burning—and the backyard,” Grace said, her voice shaking. “We need to go out the front. That’s the only exit now.”
“Trouble is, we’ve got company,” Miles said.
“Kaleena . . .” Basha muttered. It was the first time Nadia had heard her grandmother say that name in years.
Miles nodded. “Yeah. She’s out there.” He jogged down the stairs carrying Basha, with Grace and Nadia running after him.
Thick black tendrils of smoke curled upward, turning the entire entrance hall into a seething mass of poisonous haze. More smoke belched from underneath the door to the showroom, and though she couldn’t see the flames, Nadia could hear that telltale crackle coming from the kitchen.
She pulled the neckline of her T-shirt over her nose and mouth. It wasn’t much, but it’d give her a few extra seconds. At her side, Grace followed suit, while Miles dipped his chin into the collar of his sweatshirt and put his sleeve over Basha’s mouth. Wielding the old woman like she weighed nothing, Miles ran toward the entrance hall.
“Stop! Put me down,” Basha called out when they were halfway across.
“Is the smoke getting to you?” Miles asked, having no choice but to set her down once she started flailing.
Basha lumbered toward Nadia, her free hand gripping Nadia’s wrist. “Tell Wishmaster that you could no save me from flames. Tell her I was stubborn as mule. Tell her I locked myself in bedroom and refuse to leave, to protect house. Tell her I no believe about the tea.” She brought Nadia’s hand up and kissed it gently.
