“I rented two rooms, but we should stay together…” Bessemer lips were hardly moving. “Put out the wood chips… and berries… My bag is in the car, send the doll…”
He was lying diagonally on the bed, and Mira tried to shift him. It was impossible, he was pretty much a ragdoll himself now, but a two hundred pound one. She ended up lifting his legs and pushing them on the bed as well. He groaned and toed off his boots.
“Wake me up in an hour,” he mumbled.
Mira took the comforter from under Vasya, who grumbled something annoyed without tearing their eyes off the screen. Mira covered Bessemer, his breathing already deep and even.
Mira would like to crash as well, but there was work to do.
“Alright, Vasya, enough CSI for now. I need your help here.”
The doll tried to give her puppy eyes, but Mira simply had no energy for it.
Chapter 5. A Phone Call
After they took care of the clothes and put out the protection for the room, Mira climbed under the comforter on the second bed, while Vasya sat in her feet, watching TV on mute. Apparently, the doll didn’t need to sleep - and was also supposed to change back into the obereg at dawn. Mira put the skin out, and they agreed that Vasya would wake up Mira and Bessemer before the sun rose. It still left them three hours of sleep, and Mira was starting to appreciate the luxury of uninterrupted rest even for that long.
***
“Mira, wake up!”
Vasya was shaking her shoulder, and Mira grudgingly opened her eyes. It was still dark in the room. Vasya shoved Mira’s iPhone under her nose - and it took Mira several seconds to understand that it was her Mom’s number glowing on the screen.
The phone was on vibrate, considering Mira hardly expected anyone to call her. She had the alarm clock set on it for Vasya. And now it was shaking in the doll’s hand, and it had Yana’s number on it.
Mira grabbed it, and after two clumsy jerky movements she finally managed to swipe across the screen.
“Mira, it’s me. Don’t say anything,” her Mom’s voice hissed into the phone. “If he’s near you, leave the room. If he can hear us, pretend it’s a wrong number.”
Mira glanced at sleeping Bessemer, rolled off the bed, and rushed into the washroom. She locked the door behind her and sank on the floor on her knees.
“Mom?” she whispered into the phone.
“Yes, detochka, yes, it’s me.” Her Mom’s voice broke. “Are you safe? Are you alone?”
“I’m in a motel in Gimli, I’m with… Kosh,” Mira answered, and threw a look at the door. “Mom, are you OK? Where are you?”
“Sweetie, we have no time to discuss it. I need you to get out of there. This man— He’s dangerous.”
“Mom, you told Ms. Klaassen to call him—”
“Mira, I can’t explain anything right now, but he isn’t what he seems. He’s working for some very bad people, Mira. I was wrong to trust him. He’d betrayed us, and you’re in danger. Please...” There was some noise in the background, and Yana’s voice rose. “Mira, I need you to leave, right now! You need to get back to Winnipeg. Take a bus, or something! I need you to meet me.”
“But, mom—”
“Mira, listen to me! We have no time! You need to grab your stuff and run from him. Do you understand? And the doll! They are both dangerous. You can order the doll to stay and to tell him nothing, it’ll listen to you. You must get away from that man, Mira...” There was pleading in Yana’s voice now.
“Alright, alright...” Mira’s mind thrashed. “But where do I go? Even if I get back to the city, where do I go?”
“Just go home, Mira. You need to go home.”
“Home? But they will find me there? You said—”
“Mira, you have to do as I say! Trust me, home is safe now. I’ll be waiting for you there.”
“Alright… But, mom—”
“Mira!” Bessemer’s voice came from the room, and then Mira heard a click and a tone in the cell. “Mira, where are you?”
Mira took two deep, calming breaths in, still staring at the dark screen.
“Mira?”
“I’m in the bathroom. I’ll be right out.”
She rose on unstable feet and turned on the water in the sink. Her hands were shaking. She pushed the phone in the pocket of her sweat pants and started washing her face.
***
Mira stepped out of the bathroom. The first light of the day was slowly crawling through the dirty blinds on the window. Bessemer was sitting on his bed, running his left hand through his dishevelled dark hair. On the second bed, Mira saw Vasya, now back into the ragdoll form.
“The doll said you were on the phone. Who was it?”
He yawned widely and gave her a squinted look.
“Marketing. One of those credit card scams, where they try to frighten you with exceeding your limit.”
Bessemer tilted his head and gave her a studying look. She went to her backpack, tucked on a chair, and started rummaging in it, as if looking for the toothbrush Bessemer had bought for her in the convenience store near Mike’s diner.
“So, what do we do now?” she asked without turning to him.
“Well, the doll is now useless, so we need to move. I still say we try the tea house. A person with a wolf spirit can’t help you hide, but they give safe passage. That’s why protagonists always ride them in fairy tales. I suspect he’s probably a lorry driver, or works on the railway. They tend to gravitate to transportation.”
“So, you think my Mom went to see him?” Mira asked, and she could hear how tense her voice was.
“She left you the Kolovrat, which is the strongest protection she had, so yeah, I assume she’d try to find a guide.”
Bessemer’s voice was even, and when Mira straightened up and looked at him, she could see how attentively his eyes followed her.
“And if we find the guy and he agrees to help us, where do we go? I mean, what’s the long term plan?”
She twirled the toothbrush in her fingers.
“I don’t have one, Mira,” he answered calmly. “So far it’s been more of a ‘surviving the next hour’ kind of deal. We need to hide you from Yadviga, that’s what your Mom would want us to do.”
Something sounded off in his words.
“And what would you have us do?” she asked carefully.
Bessemer withstood her scrutinizing look.
“If I were alone, I’d go look for her. She has no magic, and knowing your Mom she’s trying to lead them away from you, which means she’s being as loud and exposed as possible.”
“Because you feel guilty about what happened before,” Mira said quietly. “And you don’t want to let Yadviga win.”
“Mira, I don’t give a damn whether Yadviga gets her power. And I don’t think sacrificing your Mom is worth it. All I care about is getting the two of you out of this.”
Mira exhaled slowly and sat on the second bed in front of him. She looked him over - and he didn’t hide his eyes.
“She just called me. It was her on the phone. But— It just didn’t feel right,” she muttered and gave him a cautious look.
His face softened.
“Good call. Not telling anything to adults was what deprived Harry of his godfather.” Bessemer stretched his hand to her. “Let me see the phone.”
Mira placed the cell on his palm. He swiped the screen and looked at the log.
“What exactly felt wrong? The voice? Did she say something unusual?” He passed the phone back to her.
“No. It was more of a general feeling… She said you’d betrayed us. And that I needed to run away from you and go back home. That it was safe now. And— it just didn’t feel right. And she was super freaked out, which makes sense with everything that’s going on. But she just never… falls apart like this, you know.”
“Your Mom opened the door of the underworld and didn’t ‘fall apart.’ I’m with you on that,” Bessemer answered absent-mindedly, frowning, probably already pondering t
heir options.
“She called me ‘detochka,’ which is how she calls me,” Mira added in a small voice, and he gave her a grave look. “Are they forcing her into it? Are they… torturing her?”
“Not physically, probably,” Bessemer answered.
If he thought that was reassuring, he was cruelly mistaken.
“There’s a kind of a spirit called Charmer Magpie. They create illusions. Impersonate people. And voices are their specialty. If they got your Mom soon after she ran from your house, they’d have enough time to break her.”
“Break her?” Mira’s throat felt choked.
“A Magpie needs to establish a link into a person’s mind to be able to extract images. That’s why it sounded just like your Mom on the phone. And your Mom would fight it for as long as possible. It’s been two days, which is longer than most would last, I have to tell you.”
Bessemer rose with a groan and got himself a bottle of water from the mini-fridge. He limped noticeably, and his right arm moved awkwardly.
“It means they are keeping her somewhere in the city. They wouldn’t have had time to move her away. They got her and locked her up with a Magpie.”
“How did they get the number?” Mira asked. “You’re the only one who had it.”
Bessemer took another gulp of water and then gave her a small smile. It wasn’t a happy or funny kind of smile, but it was warm and sincere.
“Sharp, aren’t you?” He sat back on the bed. “Credit cards, mobile phones, anything digital is very easy to trace. The old magic, like scrying to find a person with a crystal pendulum suspended over a map required a person’s possession to work. Hair or a cup they drank from. We left plenty of that in Mike’s diner. They couldn’t find us because your doll was shielding us, but you charged your phone in Mike’s outlets, and that’s enough these days. They have wiccans for that, to follow a digital trail. And computer hackers too,” he added giving her a pointed look. “So, no Facebook or Instagram.”
“What would I Instagram? A shishiga crawling at me from a ditch?” Stress always made Mira more sassy.
Bessemer gave her a small chuckle.
“Don’t forget to hashtag it ‘new friend’,” he answered, and then his face grew serious. “Mira, we need to decide now. Are we getting your Mom out, or we are trying to get away from the city? We’re in this together, and I say, you get a vote here.”
“We are getting Mom out,” she answered right away, but then added in a squeaky voice, “Can we?”
“I think I have a way to find her. I also think it might work, because I doubt Yadviga is with her. If she even is in the country yet. And since you were told to go to your house, that’s where they will be waiting for you. Whatever protection your Mom had on the house has been broken, that’s why she told you to leave right away. But it’s still a magical place, a ‘soft spot’ so to say. How long have the two of you lived there?”
“Twelve years.”
“Then definitely a ‘soft spot.’ Yadviga would feel uncomfortable in the mortal world, in the open, especially during the day. Her and her husband would need a base, and your house would be most suitable.”
“Her husband? Is he my grandfather?” Mira’s head was spinning from all these new relatives she’d gotten in the last two days.
“Yeah, but he’s of little importance, trust me. She’d broken his will centuries ago. Now he’s more of an exotic accessory. Yana used to joke that Yadviga would forget him in a shop like a wallet sometimes.”
“Great,” Mira grumbled.
“Hey, Krapiva women are a force to reckon with,” he joked, but Mira didn’t feel like laughing.
“How are we going to find my Mom?”
“We make a magic compass. Pass me my bag, please,” Bessemer asked.
When she did, he fished out several pouches and a small glass bottle. It was about five inch tall, round, had a cork on top, and altogether looked like something a person would buy in Michael’s for a craft project they found on Pinterest.
Another pouch contained what seemed like a sewing kit to Mira. There were needles, pins, and thread in it. Bessemer took out a needle and pushed a thread through its eye. He then took out the cork from the bottle, pushed the needle and the thread through it. He adjusted the length so that the needle could hang inside the bottle without touching the bottom, tied the thread’s other end, and put the cork aside.
A strange assortment of objects from different pouches went inside the bottle: a stark black feather, a few dried red berries, a pinch of salt, two little bones, from a bird or a rodent of sorts, an acorn, and three kinds of dried herbs, just a couple sprigs each.
“How does this thing work exactly?” Mira asked, while Bessemer was closing the pouches and stuffing them in his messenger bag.
“A scrier establishes the link with the person they are looking for. A blood link is the best. I’ll be the one scrying. You’d have a stronger connection, as a blood relative, but you’ve never done it, and it requires certain skill. So, I prick my finger, drip the blood into the bottle, and there’ll be a drop on the end of the needle. This way there is a link between me and your Mom - and I drive. You hold the bottle in your hands and tell me where to go. Easy peasy.”
Mira gave him a disbelieving look. Firstly, he was the last person she expected to hear ‘easy peasy’ from. Secondly, that clearly wasn’t all that was to it. He looked obviously uncomfortable.
“OK...” she drew out. “And?”
“We should eat first,” he said. “Let’s get our stuff and leave. Because once the compass is activated, we will need to move fast. The link will slowly disintegrate, and I’m not at my best right now. I won’t hold it for long.”
Mira studied him for a second and then started packing. They brushed their teeth and cleaned up as much as they could in fifteen minutes. They checked the beds and pillows for hair, and Mira gently packed Vasya into the pocket of her jacket. The night before the doll had burnt Bessemer’s bloodied clothes and the bag, so they only needed to take the bucket. Mira felt funny about stealing a cheap plastic bucket, but Bessemer left some additional cash on the table in the room, not to ‘spoil their karma,’ as he called it. He also told her to leave the phone in the room.
They were now driving back to the city, and Mira asked for his phone. She had about twenty minutes before they got to the nearest Tim’s, and she decided it was time for some research on Russian folklore.
Questions started to pop up right away, and Bessemer would scoff and jeer in response.
“It says you’re supposed to look like a skeleton,” she muttered, without lifting her eyes from the screen.
“Rubbish,” he grumbled back.
“It says in some stories you can only be killed by a horse.”
“Rubbish. I love horses, and there are other ways.” He jerked the wheel, changing lanes.
“It says your soul, and consequently your death, is in an egg, which is in a duck, which is—”
“In a hare, which is in an iron chest, which is buried inside, or underneath an oak tree, on an island, in the middle of the sea,” he interrupted her in an annoyed voice. “Also, rubbish.”
“Is anything true here?” Mira asked and waved the cell in the air.
“I do have a magical connection to ravens and snakes, and I have been incarcerated in the underworld on more than two occasions due to my poor taste in allies,” he answered in a sardonic tone.
“It says nothing about ravens and snakes here, and only the third article mentions any incarceration. But it also says you like to ride your horse naked.”
Bessemer threw her an exasperated glance askance, and Mira shrugged theatrically.
“I’m just reading what it says in Wikipedia.”
“I’m so having a talk with your mother,” he grumbled, but Mira saw he was hiding a smile.
Mira smirked and went back to her reading.
***
They grabbed the food to go and quickly gobbled up sandwiches and coffe
e in silence while the car sped on.
Once at the perimeter, Bessemer drove off the highway, onto a side road, and parked the truck so that shrubs shielded them from the passing cars.
He took out the bottle from his messenger bag.
“I’ll drip my blood inside, we will close it, and the needle will start to move,” he explained. “Don’t take your eyes off it. It will start moving, pointing at a direction, leaning on one side, but it’ll also be swinging from the car’s movements. You will need to watch it carefully. It’ll be pretty obvious, at least at the beginning. It’ll look unnatural.” Bessemer pulled out the cork. “The thing is, the stronger the link, the stiffer the string. It’ll look tense for a while, but I’m not her blood relative, and not her… anything. So, it’ll be wobbly. My end of the connection will be strong, due to my magic, but nothing will be coming from the other end.”
He handed her the cork, and with a sigh settled the bottle on his lap. He looked really nervous, and Mira looked at him questioningly. And then he picked up the thick silver chain from around his neck and pulled out a round pendant. It was a locket, and he twirled it in his fingers.
“There needs to be a link between your Mom and me, my blood working as a tether. One drop on the needle, another on her possession. So, I’ll use… her hair.”
“What?”
Mira watched him press at the lock on the pendant, and the lid sprang open. There was a photo inside, and a lock of red hair, curled into a ring.
“Is this my Mom’s?” Mira asked in shock.
“Yeah,” Bessemer muttered, clearly signalling that he wasn’t going to continue this discussion.
“Let me see,” Mira demanded and stretched her hand to him.
“Mira, we have no time,” he tried to object.
Mira shook her open hand in front of his nose. She wasn’t going to let it go! Bessemer emitted one of his ‘I’m so fed up with this’ sighs, took out the lock, and pulled the chain off his neck. He handed her the necklace and carefully lowered the hair at the bottom of the bottle.
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