by Dima Zales
She’s right. The charred flesh lacks more than just its aura. It’s barely recognizable as having once been a person—and will probably haunt my nightmares for the rest of my days.
Same for the barbecue smell.
“Why?” Thalia drops the now-empty fire extinguisher, her reedy voice hoarse and her thin face twisted by grief. “Why would someone do this?”
Does she realize she just broke her vow of silence?
I turn to face her. “To get to me,” I answer grimly. “Baba Yaga doesn’t care about collateral damage.”
“Baba Yaga?” Thalia’s hands bunch into fists. “Whoever that is, I’ll make her pay.”
“Get in line,” I say. “A long line.”
“We were actually going on an errand that could help us cripple that bitch,” Kit says, her voice low and lethal. “You’re welcome to join us.”
Sirens blare in the distance.
Someone must’ve already called the emergency services.
“We have to go,” Felix says. “We don’t want to be stuck here trying to explain what happened to the human police.”
Kit takes out her phone and types something, then puts it away. “Let’s go. A couple of Enforcers will handle the cops.”
No one moves, so Kit herds us to the limo like stunned sheep.
Thalia recovers her composure first, and jumps behind the wheel.
Kit and I help Felix into the limo, then climb in ourselves.
With a screech of tires, Thalia launches the ride forward.
I locate the first-aid kit and order Felix to show me where he’s hurt.
“It’s just a few scratches.” He exposes his back. “I’ll be fine.”
Ignoring his bravado, I clean the scrapes.
It gives me something to focus on—something other than the awful images in my mind.
Felix cringes when alcohol touches the cuts, but doesn’t faint or cry out.
Come to think of it, he didn’t even faint at the sight of a burned body. Proximity to me seems to be desensitizing my usually squeamish roommate.
“Take this.” I hand Felix two Tylenol pills.
“Thanks, Mom,” he says but takes them, chasing them with fancy sparkling water from the limo’s bar.
We buckle up and fall silent. With the adrenaline rush subsiding, everyone is processing what happened.
Focusing on meditative breathing, I cradle my knees with my hands and rock back and forth.
My thoughts spin around like a centrifuge in a lab.
If Nero didn’t send the limo for me as promptly as he did, we would’ve taken Kit’s car to JFK.
It would’ve been our charred bodies on the asphalt instead of poor Bentley’s.
The relief I feel at being alive is poisoned with guilt and more than a little fear.
Someone tried to kill me.
Again.
Me, Felix, and Kit, to be precise.
The explosion flits through my mind again, and white-hot anger ignites underneath the shock.
If this was Baba Yaga’s doing, she’ll answer for it—and everything else.
If Vlad doesn’t get her, I will.
Her and Koschei.
In fact, I think I might enjoy his death even more.
Taking a breath, I consider if the explosion could’ve been a hit by someone else.
Chester, for example. Perhaps he heard about my interactions with Roxy—his daughter—and decided to come after me again.
Chewing on a hangnail, I call Nero. His voicemail answers, and I leave him a message to call me back as soon as he can.
We ride the rest of the way to JFK in silence, pretending not to hear the sobs coming from the driver’s side of the limo.
Thalia is definitely not as heartless as she appeared during my training.
That, or she and Bentley were especially close.
The car stops at the drop-off area, and the partition separating us from the driver slides down.
Thalia shows us her phone’s screen, where she wrote:
I assume you’re headed for the Otherlands.
“Yes,” Kit says without batting an eye at the strange mode of communication. “Buyan is our destination.”
I’ve exiled myself to Earth, Thalia writes. I’d be breaking my vows if I left.
She doesn’t seem to realize she’d spoken out loud after the explosion, breaking her vow of silence, and I’m not about to remind her.
“You can’t leave a car here anyway,” Felix says. “Not if you plan to keep it.”
“We got this. Don’t worry,” I tell Thalia as reassuringly as I can. “You might help us most if you stay nearby and give us a lift back when we return. Something tells me this limo is bulletproof.” I knock on the tinted window.
Nero told us it was, Thalia writes, then looks away as tears glimmer in her eyes.
I guess she realized that the “us” doesn’t include Bentley anymore.
“We’ll see you later then,” Kit says to the nun.
Thalia reaches for my phone, puts in a number, and dials.
When her own phone rings, she hangs up and turns the missed call into a contact in my phone book.
Handing the phone back to me, she waves us goodbye.
We briskly walk into the airport and head for the secret passages.
“Let me see if I remember the way,” I tell them once we start to traverse the corridors that lead to the hub.
“Go for it,” Felix says.
I lead the way, and no one has to correct me.
“Good job,” Kit says when we enter the giant room. “Want to follow my map the rest of the way?”
I take out the diagram she drew and walk up to a purple gate in the south corner of the room.
“That’s it,” Kit says and steps through the gate.
“After you,” Felix says, so I follow Kit.
The hub on the other side is a cave.
At least I assume it’s a cave. The place smells earthy, like wine cellars and basements, and the “sky” is covered by luminescent critters of some kind.
“How can I tell where west would be?” I pull out my phone, but it’s going berserk.
“It’s not a true west,” Kit explains. “When it comes to these maps, the convention is to assume you’re facing north when you exit any gate. That’s one of the many flaws with this methodology and why Hekima came up with his own system.”
I walk up to the green gate in the “western” corner, and Kit gives me a round of applause before she jumps inside.
Felix and I follow.
The hub we end up in is in the desert.
At least I think that’s what it is.
I always imagined some kind of life exists in every desert, no matter how dry, but the desolation here seems total and complete, without even a dried-up cactus in sight.
A red gate is next.
The hub on the other side is teaming with Cognizant—who set up a bazaar right there between the gates.
The smell of unfamiliar spices teases my nostrils as I push through the strange crowd to the gate we need.
The next gate looks a lot like the one at JFK.
The one after that is inside a tree, like in the Avatar movie.
Going though world after world like this reminds me of the Orientation lecture the other week, when Dr. Hekima used his powers to give the class a taste of the Otherlands.
The final gate brings us to a hub located in the middle of a forest meadow.
Though to call this a forest is like calling Mount Everest a hill. The trees are reminiscent of birches, but are tall enough to touch the clouds.
“This way.” Kit wades through shoulder-height grass toward the edge of the meadow, where a sky-high oak tree is covered by an enormous golden chain—like the neck of a giant rapper.
I make out a small figure as we get closer to the oak tree.
The size of a panther, the black tomcat (I assume) looks like a very big Siberian domestic cat.
Oh, and there a
re pince-nez-style glasses on his flat fluffy nose.
I exhale loudly.
The cat stops pacing around the tree and looks at us with uncanny intelligence.
“Are there hallucinogens in the air here?” I ask Felix under my breath.
“Doubt it,” he whispers back. “I’ve heard bedtime stories about this. Every Russian child has. Now I wonder if Pushkin—the famous Russian poet—was one of the Cognizant just as my grandfather had always claimed.”
Kit walks up to the tree and says something to the cat in what I assume to be Russian.
“She just asked the cat if he knows the way to the Golden Hare Inn,” Felix translates.
The cat moves the glasses higher up his nose with a fluffy paw, then uses the same paw to point to a rickety road to the left of us.
Then, to add insult to injury, he starts talking in a deep baritone, speaking what might be Russian.
I rub my temples.
An honest-to-goodness talking cat.
We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore.
“I can barely make sense of his dialect,” Felix whispers. “But I think he said it’s that way—and to be careful of something.”
“That’s my understanding as well,” Kit says. “He also offered to give you head.”
“I don’t think that’s what he said.” Felix takes a step back. “I think he said ‘you have a big head.’”
“I’d like to float my hallucinogen idea again,” I say. “I’ll accept vampires, zombies, and a telepathically communicating chinchilla who can turn into a monster, but I draw the line at a giant talking cat. With glasses.”
Felix chuckles while Kit says something to the cat, then turns to face us. “It’s far. I better give you a ride.”
Felix and I exchange confused glances, and by the time we look back, Kit is no longer standing there.
Instead, there’s a beautiful black mare.
“Kit?” I look over the horse, with its intricate saddle and jewel-studded reins.
The horse nods its head.
“You want us to… ride you?” Felix asks, blushing.
Kit/horse winks a green eye at him.
“Give me a boost,” I tell Felix.
In stunned silence, he helps me get on Kit’s back, then hands me the reins.
I give Felix a hand, and he gets on behind me.
“Hands on my waist and nowhere else,” I tell him without turning, and I can almost feel his blush intensify as his hands grasp my midsection.
“No pony-play jokes either,” I add. “Whatever happens in Buyan, stays in Buyan.”
Felix’s laugh sounds borderline hysterical.
Kit snorts, then leaps into a whiplash-inducing gallop.
The bumpy ride isn’t my biggest problem, though. Since I’m sitting in the front, birch branches spank me as though I were a hardcore banya enthusiast.
We reach a three-way fork in the road. A big stone stands there prominently, with something etched on it in a pretty font in what I assume is Russian—there’s a reversed R there and everything.
Felix squints at the writing. “This dialect is even harder to discern in written form, but I think it says: if you go left, you lose your horse but save yourself. If you go right, you lose yourself but save your horse. If you go straight, you lose yourself and your horse.”
Kit turns left.
Seeing how she’s the horse, I guess it’s her choice to make.
Then I realize we’re no longer riding a horse.
Kit sprouts horns and grows taller underneath us.
“She’s turned herself into a reindeer,” Felix whispers in case I didn’t figure that out yet.
“No jokes about Kit being horny,” I whisper back.
Felix chuckles for a while, then eventually quiets down.
I bet his butt is as numb as mine.
When we exit the forest, we finally understand what the cat was talking about.
A giant head is in front of us.
Chapter Forty
It’s a man’s head.
At least I hope so. It has a long beard, a strong nose, and a prominent chin.
A pointy helmet the size of a cistern adorns the head, and from this vantage point, it’s unclear if the head is just sprouting from the ground, or if there’s a giant man stuck in a huge ditch.
“Was the gold chain around that tree once on this dude’s neck?” I ask under my breath.
No one replies.
As we get closer, it becomes clear the head is agitated.
And it has a reason.
A dozen chainmail-clad dudes on horseback are attacking it with bows, arrows, and swords.
“Bogatyrs,” Felix whispers in my ear. “They’re like these really powerful knights from Grandfather’s stories.”
The head blows on the closest bogatyr.
The hurricane-strength wind sends the warrior tumbling to the ground, his neck bent at an impossible angle.
A few moments later, he resurrects in a very familiar manner.
“Your bogatyrs must be the same type of Cognizant as Koschei,” I say over my shoulder to Felix.
“Interesting,” Felix mutters back. “Hopefully, there are enough of them here for someone to have figured out a way to kill them for good.”
I hover my hand next to my gun, in case the bogatyrs decide to bully someone their own size for a change.
The giant head gets attacked again.
The poor thing doesn’t seem to have a way to permanently kill its enemies—which might be why it eats the horse of the second attacker, along with the man’s leg.
What would happen if the giant swallowed an immortal warrior whole? Would the guy resurrect inside the giant’s stomach over and over?
Assuming the head has a stomach, that is.
One of the bogatyrs catches my attention. He’s holding an oblong object that looks like a small snow globe filled with fire.
“I think that’s a firebird egg,” Felix whispers in awed fascination. “I guess it makes sense this would be the world they get smuggled from.”
I lift my eyebrows. “Firebird?”
“That’s a Russian version of the Phoenix,” Felix says. “Grandfather said their eggs are the ultimate weapon against vampires and their vicious cousins—the upirs. I’ve heard that if the Enforcers catch you in possession of a firebird egg, a deadly accident is likely to occur to you during your ‘arrest.’ It’s rumored that the Council has a bunch of these and other cool weapons stashed below their castle.”
With a battle cry, the warrior tosses the firebird egg at the giant head.
The head’s flying-saucer-sized eyes widen; then it desperately blows at the egg.
The gambit works. The firebird egg flies back at the thrower, hits his shield, and explodes into a huge ball of all-consuming fire.
Flesh and chainmail melt as the bogatyr and his horse scream in agony.
Feeling nausea coming on, I look back at Felix. “Could these firebird eggs be the weapon we need to defeat Koschei? The bannik mentioned a duck egg, but maybe—”
Felix points a pale, shaking finger back at the no-longer screaming bogatyr.
I turn just in time to see the ashes of the burned-up guy resurrect as if nothing happened.
There goes that idea.
The closer we get to the fighting, the more I worry about becoming collateral damage.
Kit must realize this too because she gets off the road, making a wide circle around the whole mess.
Though the roundabout makes an already bumpy ride intolerable, neither Felix nor I complain.
When the poor head is behind us, the road leads us into a bucolic farming village.
We pass by empty streets.
“People are either working in the fields or hiding out in those wooden huts,” Felix whispers.
“Or the giant head ate them all,” I reply. “Or—”
I stop talking because I see a big, wooden hut-like structure in the middle of the village.
; As we get closer, I spot a hare drawn in gold paint above the door.
“I bet that’s the Golden Hare Inn,” Felix says.
Kit stops and kneels.
We get down, and she turns back into her sarafan-clad self.
Swaying her hips, she strolls confidently into the place.
Felix and I follow warily, and I get that “walking into a Wild West saloon” vibe as a bunch of strange beings stare at us from their tables.
“I think that’s a kikimora,” Felix whispers when he sees me gazing at a wraith-like monstrosity wearing a ratty version of Kit’s dress. “And that’s probably a leshy,” he adds when I look at the most frightening creature in the place—a naked something that looks as though DC’s Swamp Thing had a child with Marvel’s Groot before raising it in Chernobyl.
Kit takes a seat at an empty table in the middle of the dining area, and we join her.
A human-looking waitress walks up to our table and hands everyone wooden slates with Russian writing burned into them.
Kit and Felix scan theirs.
“There isn’t a duck egg on this menu,” Felix says without looking up. “Now what?”
Kit says something very loudly in Russian.
The place goes dead silent, and the waitress pales.
The leshy stands up and lumbers to our table.
With a wooden fist the size of Felix’s head, he whacks the table—smashing it into little pieces. Then, grinning to reveal moss-covered teeth, he looks us over with hunger in his swampy eyes.
Chapter Forty-One
I yank out my gun and point it at the creature’s head. “Don’t move or I’ll shoot.”
The thing clearly doesn’t speak English, or if it does, it might not understand what a gun can do.
He reaches for Kit’s neck with a gigantic paw.
I squeeze the trigger.
The gun makes an unusual sound, but nothing else happens.
Despite the hand on her neck, Kit stands up, but she’s no longer herself. She now looks like our attacker, with one important and disturbing detail.
She’s the female of that species.
At least that’s what I assume based on the large breasts.
The leshy’s reaction supports my theory. He falls instantly in lust with Kit.
There’s no mistaking that tree-trunk development.