The Wise and the Wicked

by Rebecca Podos

  He dragged his unbloodied hand weakly across his mouth and rasped, “You okay?”

  “Am I okay? Yeah, but—”

  “Okay,” he sighed, then tipped forward.

  That was how his mother found them: at the bottom of the stairs, Dov resting his cheek on the floor and breathing hard, Ruby crouched awkwardly over him on her good-as-new leg, patting his damp back through his overshirt. Ruby looked up at the thud of the front door, and the click of heels, and then there she stood in the hallway.

  She surveyed the scene. “What happened?” she asked quietly.

  Even with her head swirling, Ruby saw that Mrs. Mahalel was now the picture of health.

  “I fell,” Ruby managed.

  “I see.” She nodded, as if this was explanation enough. Dropping her purse, she shoved a thick wave of auburn hair away from her face and sighed. “And he helped you? Oh, Dov . . . I really wish he hadn’t.”

  “I’m sorry.” Ruby swallowed something sharp.

  His mother knelt beside them, grabbed Dov by the shoulders, and rolled him gently over, with Ruby’s somewhat ineffectual assistance. He helped them feebly, his eyes open but fevered.

  “No,” Mrs. Mahalel said as she lay a hand on her son’s forehead. “I mean he should have waited for me. I could’ve done it myself.”

  “He’ll be all right,” Mrs. Mahalel said, “in a few days. Maybe a week or two.”

  They stood in the kitchen, an island of marble between them. Mrs. Mahalel had taken a Tupperware of soup out of the fridge for Dov, something oily and brown with vegetables and bones bobbing in it that nevertheless smelled wonderful. She poured the contents into a pot on their shiny stove and turned the burner on, a click of gas and the whoosh of the flame.

  All the while, Ruby braced against the countertop, legs tensed, ready to . . . to what? To run? To fight? To throw up on the tiled floor?

  But Mrs. Mahalel seemed perfectly collected. Gone was the polka-dot bathrobe. Her crisp white jeans and a white silk T-shirt had somehow escaped without a spot of blood or vomit. Even her necklace, strung with amber and gold and dark red beads, rested perfectly across her collarbone. Not a single hair sat askew.

  Ruby didn’t know how she looked, but she felt like a stray cat, cornered and trapped in a crate.

  “He’s a special boy,” Mrs. Mahalel continued. “In fact, our family is special. I suppose you’ve picked up on the fact that we have . . . gifts.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Ruby asked flatly, very possibly in shock. Realizing this, she tightened her grip on the cold stone to pull herself together. She was not just anybody who’d stumbled into an upside-down corner of the world they couldn’t fathom. She was a Chernyavsky, and the dark was afraid of her. “You heal people,” she said in a calmer voice. Holistic medicine was her thing, Dov had said.

  Well, it certainly wasn’t science-based.

  Mrs. Mahalel weighed the truth in her manicured hands. “We can fix what’s broken. Among other skills.”

  “Is that so different?”

  “My mother would say it is. And her mother, and hers.”

  “I thought . . . your family didn’t talk to you.”

  Mrs. Mahalel’s left eyebrow twitched before she smiled. “My son’s been whispering our secrets, I see.”

  “Not really,” Ruby answered nervously, though she couldn’t say exactly why. “We just met. We don’t really know each other.”

  “Well, now you know us a little better.” She turned away to stir the pot, then looked down the hallway toward the staircase, flinching as if her son still lay at the bottom. “He should have waited for me,” she said, this time to herself more than Ruby. “It wasn’t his place. He knows he shouldn’t be practicing.”

  “Why not?”

  Giving the pot another stir, she shrugged. “Dov might tell you, if you ask. If you really want to know. He certainly seems to like you. Maybe he even thinks it’s love, now that he’s felt the Spark.” She turned back to look at Ruby, and said dryly, “You felt it when you touched, didn’t you? I assume you and my son weren’t headed upstairs to play checkers.”

  A bright ball of energy, rolling up and down her body, crackling in her ears, catching fire . . .

  Ruby’s ears burned.

  Mrs. Mahalel nodded, satisfied. “It really is something. It’s like a . . . what do you call it, when particles collide with their opposites?”

  “An annihilation event,” Ruby mumbled. When an electron collided with a positron, it created new particles but destroyed the originals. That was the law of conservation of energy: creation required destruction.

  Nothing without a price.

  “Right, thank you.” Mrs. Mahalel looked pityingly at Ruby. “But it isn’t love. That feeling? It’s just what happens when power meets power.” Then she tipped her head, as if paying Ruby her due.

  A seed of unease blossomed suddenly into fear. Ruby’s face felt bloodless, her tongue packed with ice. “You know who I am?” But that wasn’t right. She couldn’t possibly matter to a woman like Mrs. Mahalel, unless it was the Chernyavskys themselves who mattered. “You know who we are?” she guessed again.

  “Better than you do, I assume, or you wouldn’t be here. I should have known you were one of them when I met you—that was my mistake. I was off my game. But I recognize you now.” Mrs. Mahalel took the bubbling pot off the burner. “And I know your people are very good at . . . surviving, whatever other skills you might possess. So I think you’ll listen.

  “I don’t intend to hurt a harmless child. I don’t like the taste of blood.” She ladled soup into a bowl, perched it on a wooden tray. Then she looked up at Ruby, and her eyes were no longer pitying. They were the dagger tips of icicles, cold and piercing and very Polina-like. “But if you believe nothing else, believe this, and remember it: if you get in my way, you’ll learn our gifts aren’t harmless.”

  Ruby couldn’t understand what was happening, couldn’t wrap her mind around it, but that Dov’s mother was dangerous, she did believe.

  Somehow, she scraped together the will to ask, “Did you come to Saltville to . . . did you come here looking for us?”

  Mrs. Mahalel gave a little shake of her head, glossy hair shifting. “Lisichka, you’re here because of us.” Then she set off to bring the tray upstairs. “We’ll be seeing you,” she called without looking back, leaving Ruby to show herself out.

  Ruby stumbled out of the Mahalels’ house and down their driveway with half of her winter clothes bundled in her arms. The cold cleared her head a little, and by the time she’d reached her car, thrown herself inside, and locked the doors, she could think again. She had to go to Dahlia and Ginger. She had to tell her sisters about the Mahalels. That somehow, somebody had come looking for Chernyavskys, after all. They’d call Aunt Annie and all of the nearby family. They could . . . what?

  Death premonitions weren’t exactly defensive. And when Mrs. Mahalel hinted at more sinister gifts, Ruby didn’t doubt her.

  I don’t like the taste of blood, she’d said. But something in her voice suggested that she knew it well, all the same.

  So they could pack up and run.

  They would run, Ruby knew in an instant. It was what Chernyavskys did when they were scared. When they were threatened.

  Her heart pulsed.

  Almost before she’d decided, she’d thrown the car into reverse and screeched out of the driveway, heading not toward Stone Road, but out of town. She would tell her sisters. She’d do her duty as a Chernyavsky.

  First, though, she desperately needed answers. Because there were certain truths about being a Chernyavsky that she’d always accepted. She’d believed that their powers were all but forsaken, and their fates inescapable.

  But either Polina’s Time had been wrong . . . or she’d found a way to change it, buying herself decades. There was no denying that, no matter how stubbornly the family tried to pretend it away. Polina could have saved Ruby, she was more sure of it by the day—maybe their great-aunt could
’ve helped Cece, too, found a way to free her from her own painful fate—but Polina was gone, and her sisters and aunts weren’t talking. And they never would, not with one of the bad guys they’d long expected on their doorstep at last, one who claimed to know more about the Chernyavskys than Ruby did.

  Ruby needed to know . . . whatever it was that she didn’t. She couldn’t count on some perfect clue hidden away in Polina’s house to tell her, any more than she could count on her family. And she couldn’t keep waiting, not with her Time on the horizon, and Mrs. Mahalel at her heels, and Dov—

  Stopping to sort through her feelings for Dov was another thing she had no time for.

  Yes, what she needed was answers.

  And as it turned out, pride was the first thing she was willing to lose to find them.

  • Twenty-One •

  Evelina Chernyavsky answered the door to room 113 in a powder-blue bathrobe sprinkled with little pink flowers, her hair braided into a blond-and-gray corona. She wore no makeup, and blinked heavy eyes in the light filtering through the clouds.

  It was barely eight o’clock at night—had she been in bed?

  “Ruby.” Her mother blinked and looked beyond her, as if she’d been expecting somebody else on her doorstep. Finding no one, she shuffled back to let Ruby in.

  Though the air outside was freezing, Ruby didn’t rush across the threshold, but stepped cautiously over it. She could tell on sight that the Molehill Motel wasn’t a mints-on-the-pillow place, more the vending-machine-for-dinner-except-the-vending-machine-is-busted sort of accommodations. Maybe there was a “continental breakfast” in the lodge, if they preferred boxed cereal and a pitcher of room-temperature milk on the continent. Inside the fairly barren room barely lit by a flickering bulb, there were two twin beds with two papery-looking pillows apiece. There was a mini fridge, a small TV on a bureau, and a single-serve coffee maker surrounded by boxes of assorted teas she must’ve accumulated over the last month. The closet door gaped open, her mother’s things spilling out. Worn, loose jeans, soft sweaters, milky-colored scarves. A yellow knit winter hat faded and pilled with age, a giant pom-pom perched on top.

  She recognized that hat.

  Don’t be afraid, baby. We’re Chernyavsky women. The dark is scared of us.

  There was a tug in Ruby’s heart as something ruptured, some seal puncturing, letting loose six years’ worth of little-kid need, mindless and pure. The sort Dahlia never elicited, no matter how hard they pretended that she was the “mom.” But this woman who smelled the same as she remembered? Ruby wanted her to promise again and again that it was going to be okay. She wanted her mother to take care of everything and be in charge of everything. Of Ruby’s hunt for the truth, of Ruby’s future, of Ruby.

  And that was no good at all.

  “Bathroom?” she gritted out. It was becoming her go-to move.

  Without waiting for an answer, she tracked snow and road salt into the carpet, headed for the closed door beyond the closet. Ruby hurled herself into a bathroom the unhealthy green of an overripe avocado, locking the door, sitting on the toilet, trying to breathe through what felt like pounds of gravel clogging her throat. Still, she wasn’t far enough from her mother, so she shoved back the plastic shower curtain, tucked herself into the dry bathtub, and pulled shut the curtain.

  That was a little better.

  She needed to approach this scientifically, unemotionally. Create hypotheses, ask questions, gather information.

  She needed to get her shit together.

  Crawling back out of the tub, her eye caught on the sink top. Among travel-sized bottles of shampoos and creams, hairpins and coiled cast-off jewelry, a familiar necklace winked. Polina’s locket, the one she’d seen in the little wooden box on her bedroom vanity. Her mother must’ve gone back to the house and taken it.

  Ruby doubted any of the aunts or cousins felt particularly sentimental about the locket—her mother and Aunt Annie were the closest Polina had to heirs, and as far as she could tell, Cece’s mother had wanted nothing from the house on Ivory Road. Still, something in Ruby wanted to take it just so her mother didn’t have it. Because she shouldn’t be able to come back after all this time and claim whatever pieces of the family she believed belonged to her, not after leaving it behind for years.

  Her fingers shook as they skimmed the cool gold.

  Instead, she reached into a pile of lipstick tubes, plucking one from the bunch. It was a sleek black Chanel tube labeled Insatiable, a bright poppy red when Ruby pried off the cap. She couldn’t picture her mother wearing it—whenever Evelina put on lipstick in her memories, it had always been sweet, girlish shades like Peach and Primrose. But the stick was smudged and softly dented from use.

  Ruby slipped it into her boot, where she felt the shape of it against her skin. Once that was done, she felt stronger.

  She burst from the bathroom and announced to her startled mother, still hovering by the door, “Here’s how this will work. You said after the Reading that I didn’t know who the Chernyavskys really were, and to come find you when I wanted answers. Well, now I do, and maybe you think I’m too young or stupid to hear them, but I’m not. That’s the only reason I’m here. I want to know what I don’t know, no matter how complicated.” Ruby paused, a bit out of breath, and finished hoarsely, “Okay?”

  Emotions flickered across Evelina’s face like the flare of passing streetlights on a dark road, too many and too fast for Ruby to name. “I’m . . . I’m so glad you came, zerkal’tse, really. I’ve been so hoping you would, but . . . this isn’t the best time.”

  “Not the best—” Ruby broke off, feeling suddenly small again. She shifted her foot until the uncomfortable but comforting pressure of the lipstick tube against her ankle bone reminded her that she had the power. “Why not?” she demanded. “Your Tinder date is on his way?”

  “No, it’s . . .” Her mother’s eyes darted to the clock on the nightstand. “Never mind, we’ve got a little while.” Her mother sat down on one stiff twin bed. “Where do we begin?”

  Although Ruby was swimming in questions, their dark shapes bobbing all around her as she tried to tread water—crowding her, threatening to drown her—she’d prepared for this on the drive up. From her backpack, she pulled out the book of fairy tales she kept with her always, the torn pages of Vasilisa’s inscrutable story tucked inside. “Here,” she ordered. “Tell me what this means to you.” It wasn’t her most pressing question, but that made it manageable. It was a small, solid place to start.

  Her mother turned the book over in her lap, face distant. Ruby sat down on the other bed, legs crossed, feigning patience, though she felt time trickling through her fingers, moment by moment.

  “This was a gift from Polina,” her mother said at last, brushing her fingertips across the yellowed pages. “She brought it with her from Russia when she and her sisters emigrated, and gave it to me when my mother was—after I came to live with her.”

  “What was it like?” Ruby asked. Her whole life, Polina had been there, but lately, she’d been wondering whether she ever actually knew her.

  Wasn’t that just what Dahlia had said about their mother, that the woman who’d waved to Ruby as she ran to catch the school bus was a totally separate person from the real Evelina Chernyavsky? She’d been furious with Dahlia for suggesting it, but maybe, sometimes, it was complicated.

  “What, growing up? Well. My mother, Galina, had been a shy woman. Kind, but not one to command attention. Vera would talk your ear off about anything, and Polina was . . . not quiet.” The way she said it seemed affectionate, but there was a flattened expression on her face, like a map of mountains rather than the jagged earth itself. “So it was different, growing up in my aunt’s house. Her rules were strict, but strange. When we were teenagers, she didn’t care if Annie and I broke into the vodka supply to get silly in our bedroom, or snuck out to meet neighborhood boys by the pond in the woods behind Ivory Road, or lied to our teachers when we hadn’t done our homewo
rk—though Annie almost always did hers, she was too scared of authority figures.

  “If we lied to Polina, on the other hand, we got long lectures, half in Russian, and had to peel vegetables until bedtime. Annie called her Baba Yaga.”

  In spite of herself, Ruby laughed. “Sometimes the cousins did, too.”

  “It was a good name. She wasn’t cruel but . . . she had her opinions, and wasn’t one to blunt them to spare us. We knew exactly what she thought of us, even as girls. Annie said I was the favorite, and I guess I was. Polina showed me things she never tried to teach my sister. I ate it all up. It was never enough. Annie had a thirst to please, but no real ambition. Polina loved us both, I suppose, in her way. I do believe she tried to make up for . . . what happened to our mother. Still, she was no Galina Chernyavsky.” Evelina’s eyes glittered sharply, as she said this, then dulled when she saw Ruby staring. “Anyways, she taught me more than my mother could have, though I always wanted to learn more.”

  “What exactly did she teach you?” Ruby asked, hope flaring bright and hungry.

  Her mother picked up the fairy-tale book again. “She told me stories. This book was one of her prized possessions, and I practically had it memorized. It was written by a man your great-aunt knew back home, one of the people her mother helped. And that’s a story, too.”

  Polina Chernyavsky grew up knowing little about the cities across the river, their factories and power stations and processing plants. All her early memories were of the quiet forest, of her mother, Vladlena, and the sister born when she was five. Galina’s fiery-red curls, her cloth diapers and rag dolls. Galina, tied to their mother’s back with a knotted blanket while they worked in the garden, pulling berries and mushrooms and roots as Vladlena pointed them out. Polina was put in charge of her sister whenever their mother went up the mud path, crossing the river to bring back supplies they couldn’t grow or weave themselves . . . and whenever someone from the cities crossed the river and made their way into the forest to see Vladlena. From the time Galina was old enough to be shushed, the sisters would spy on their mother’s work through the uneven door slats of the room where all three slept.