Wickedly Dangerous

by Deborah Blake

  “I’m sorry, Old Thing,” she said, patting it again before rising as creakily as if she’d suddenly manifested her true age to drag the battered motorcycle the rest of the way off of the road. “I’ll come back for you tomorrow at first light and see what I can do.”

  She limped away down the verge without looking back, cursing Maya Freeman with every aching step and ragged breath. Each time her booted foot hit the ground, cut-glass shards of pain shot through her knee and jarred the elbow she hugged close to her body. The discomfort barely registered, though, drowned out by the fury that beat like a wild bird against the inside of her chest. That stag was no normal animal—it had either been sent by Maya, or possibly, even been Maya herself in another form or wearing another glamour.

  The bitch had tried to kill her. This was war.

  * * *

  LIAM DROVE SLOWLY down the long, narrow county highway. Half of his awareness was absorbed by the unpleasant errand that brought him out there, the other half searched the sides of the road for any signs of a lost child, more out of obsessive habit than any conscious intention. His tortoise pace, born of reluctance as much as caution, and that constant, darting sideways glance, were the only reasons he saw the motorcycle at all.

  A glint of something foreign and metallic caught in his headlights in the increasing dusk gloom, and he pulled over as much as was possible on a road that barely fit two cars side by side. Wildflowers brushed the passenger side, leaving smeary golden kisses along the neat blue paint. Flashers sending crimson warning signals into the night, he opened the door of the cruiser and walked over to examine his find more closely.

  The air whooshed out of his lungs as if he’d been sucker-punched when he recognized the mangled remains of Baba’s classic BMW. The lack of an equally damaged body was somewhat reassuring, although he fetched a flashlight from the car and searched for any signs of a wounded woman staggering around, lost and confused. When he didn’t find her, he called in to dispatch to find out if the accident had been reported or if Baba had turned up at the local hospital. Two negatives later, he put in a call to Bob at the auto shop, then got back in his squad car to go look for her.

  No more than three minutes later, the glow from his headlights picked out a limping figure moving determinedly in the direction of the clearing where the Airstream was parked. This time he didn’t even bother to pull over, just eased to a stop and opened the passenger door.

  “Good evening,” he said cordially.

  “The hell it is,” Baba retorted, scowling into the dim recesses of the car. “It’s a lousy evening, in fact.”

  Liam smothered a relieved laugh. She sounded too grumpy to be seriously injured. “I know. I saw your bike a little way down the road. Are you hurt? It looked like you took one heck of a spill.”

  She gave an abortive shrug, stopping the move in midmotion and clutching her elbow. “I’m fine. But my poor motorcycle is a mess.” It looked as though even saying the words pained her, although that might have been the elbow. With Baba, it was hard to tell.

  “Get in,” Liam said. “I’ll drive you the rest of the way.” When she looked as though she was going to argue, he added, “I needed to talk to you anyway.” And at her deepening glower, “I know, I know—I promised you three days. But something’s come up. Now get in the damned car before I get out and throw you in.”

  “You and what army?” the cloud-haired woman muttered. But she slid into the seat, suppressing a wince as she did so.

  When they pulled up in front of the trailer a couple of minutes later, she hauled herself out of the squad car and shuffled lopsidedly toward the front door before he could even try to help her. Liam heaved a sigh and followed her in. Chudo-Yudo sauntered over to meet them, sniffing at Baba’s ruined pants and whining. She said something in Russian and the dog barked a couple of times. It sounded for all the world like they were having a conversation.

  “Hello, Chudo-Yudo,” Liam said, not wanting to be left out. Besides, if she wouldn’t let him be nice to her, maybe he could get a couple of brownie points being nice to her dog. “How are you tonight?”

  Chudo-Yudo sniffed him too, then licked his hand and woofed enthusiastically.

  “At least your dog likes me,” he said to Baba, trying to check out the damage without being obvious about it. If he had to, he’d haul her to the emergency room, but something told him he’d need the cuffs to do it.

  Baba rolled her eyes at him. “Don’t bet on it. He just thinks you smell like hamburger.”

  He’d grabbed fast food on the way out here, but how could—ah. “Very funny. You saw the empty takeout bag in the car. Nice one, though. You almost had me believing you had a talking dog.”

  “He’s not a talking dog,” Baba muttered. “He’s a talking dragon that looks like a dog. That’s much more unusual.” She hobbled to the sink and got a glass of water, wincing a little when it touched a cut on her lip.

  Liam ignored her silliness. She was clearly trying to distract him. Or maybe she had a concussion. He eyed her intently. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  She put the empty glass down and turned back around to face him, leaning against the counter to take the weight off her bad leg. “A huge golden stag ran me off the road.” She said it like she didn’t expect him to believe her.

  “A stag?” he said, confused. “Wait, you mean a deer?” Finally, something that made sense. “We have a lot of problems out here with deer-versus-vehicle accidents. Sometimes the deer loses, sometimes the motorists does. And that’s when the driver is in a car or a truck. On that bike, you’re lucky you weren’t killed.” His heart clenched at the sudden image of the scene he could have come upon, sending out a grateful thought to a god he didn’t worship anymore.

  “Yes,” she said dryly. “Someone is going to be very disappointed.”

  As he tried to figure that one out, she took a shaky yet still somehow threatening step forward. “Not that I don’t appreciate the ride back, but why are you here? I thought we had a deal that you were going to leave me alone for three days. It’s barely been one.”

  “I got called in to Peter Callahan’s office. His assistant Maya wanted to lodge a harassment complaint against you.” Liam frowned at Baba. “She says you accosted her in the parking lot, made all sorts of crazy accusations. Callahan wanted to have you arrested, but I managed to convince him to settle for a warning and a suggestion that you leave the area.” He shook his head, frustrated. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  A red flush spread across Baba’s high cheekbones and her nostrils flared. “Are you serious? First the woman tries to kill me, and then she sics the law on me?” Her accent grew markedly stronger as her voice rose, and she added a few words in Russian that Liam didn’t need a translator to know were probably extremely rude.

  Liam stared at her. “Do you know your eyes are glowing?” he asked in a level tone. It must have been a trick of the light, but it was a little freaky. And what was that “tried to kill me” comment all about? They were clearly back to odd, mysterious, and infuriating. Or at the moment, infuriated.

  Baba made an obvious effort to calm down, breathing in and out through her nose a few times and clenching and unclenching her hands.

  “Sorry. I need to work on my temper.”

  “You need to stay out of these people’s way,” he said flatly. “They’re very powerful around here.”

  Baba gave him an assessing look, her amber eyes back to their normal piercing stare. It made him feel a little like a bug under a microscope.

  “The charming Maya told me that her boss owns the people who run the town—is that true?”

  Somehow he thought there was a question there she wasn’t asking out loud.

  He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. They certainly seem to have a lot of influence these days. I just try to do my job and stay out of the politics. At the moment, I seem to be s
ucceeding.” He volleyed the hairy eyeball back in her direction. “By the way, do you realize you’re bleeding all over your fancy rug? You should have told me you were seriously hurt. Let me take you to the hospital.”

  “Pah,” she said, curling her lip in a way he found perversely adorable. “It’s not that bad. I’m a fast healer.”

  Liam sighed. He didn’t know for sure who Barbara Yager was, but one thing was certain: she was the most stubborn woman he’d ever met.

  “Fine. Tell me where you keep your first aid kit and I’ll patch you up myself.”

  She gave him a blank look.

  “Right. Of course you don’t have a first aid kit. You probably just put herbs on whatever cuts and burns you get.” He sighed again. “Why don’t you get out of those torn leathers and into a tee shirt and a pair of shorts, and get me a bowl of warm water and a clean cloth. I’ll go fetch my kit from the car.”

  He was almost out the door when she said, “Lavender and aloe for the burns. Maybe honey, depending on the cut. It’s antibacterial, you know.”

  Great. Now he had a mental image of her smeared with honey. He was never going to be able to use the stuff on his toast again.

  * * *

  WHEN HE CAME back in, Baba was sitting on the couch, her bad leg up on the dog’s furry back and a bottle of beer in her right hand. The tank top and shorts she wore did a nice job of exposing the extent of the road rash on her left side, and Liam hissed through his teeth in sympathy at the sight.

  “That’s got to smart,” he said, trying not to stare at her long, slim thighs. The bright red blood dripping from her left knee proved to be distracting enough. “Are you sure you don’t want me to take you to the emergency room?”

  Baba shook her head. “Machines instead of medicine; no thank you. I told you—I’m a fast healer. A couple of these,” she lifted her beer, “and a good night’s sleep, and I’ll be fine.”

  “Right. I don’t think so.” He found a silver bowl and a linen cloth where she’d placed them on the counter, and winced at putting them to such rough usage. Who kept silver bowls in an RV, anyway? Apparently the woman who was currently oozing blood all over a velvet-covered sofa without a qualm.

  He placed the bowl and his first aid kit on the coffee table and got to work, perched next to Baba on the edge of the couch. The scrape along her jaw looked raw and sore, and he had to fight the temptation to kiss it and make it better, settling for a little antibiotic ointment instead. He tried to be as gentle as possible, but the knee and elbow were both full of gravel that had to be cleaned out before he could bandage them. Baba’s face was white and set; she looked like some classical European statue of a goddess. If the goddess was covered with bruises and had black tar and grit ground into her skin.

  “It’s a good thing you wear leathers,” Liam said as he picked out a couple of deeply embedded bits of stone with a pair of tweezers that looked tiny in his big hands. “This could have been a lot worse.” He blotted away a fresh upwelling of blood and winced. “Not that it isn’t bad enough. I’m sorry if I’m hurting you.”

  Baba shrugged, although he noticed she took a long pull on her beer before saying, “My adoptive mother had a saying about such things.” She rattled off a couple of sentences in Russian that sounded like a coffee grinder running in reverse. “It means, roughly, pain is mostly mind over matter: if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

  A chuckle escaped. “My old football coach had pretty much the same saying, only he usually made you do fifty push-ups after he said it.”

  They both laughed, and Liam could feel a little of the accumulated tension slip away from his shoulders. After patting the knee dry, he dabbed some antibiotic ointment on it and started carefully wrapping a sterile dressing around the joint. Now that the worst part of the job was over, he tried not to look longingly at the beer dangling loosely from Baba’s long-fingered hand.

  A blunt head nudged his leg and he looked down in amazement to see Chudo-Yudo sitting at his feet, a beer bottle lightly clenched between alarmingly large white teeth.

  “Wow,” he said, taking it carefully from his unusual waiter and prying the top off with his Swiss Army knife. “That’s a very helpful dog.”

  Baba just rolled her eyes. “Nice,” she said to the huge white animal. “You’re two for two. Let’s not push our luck, eh?”

  As usual, Liam felt like he was missing half the conversation—the half that made sense, at that. So he changed the subject back to the issue that had brought him out here in the first place.

  “I hate to bully my patients,” he said, tucking in the ends of the bandage and pushing his hair out of his eyes before starting to wrap her elbow. “But would you like to tell me why you thought it was a good idea to hassle Maya Freeman?”

  Baba’s usual bland expression clouded over with the hint of a frown.

  “I was hoping to catch her off guard and get her to admit to something,” she confessed. “Not much of a plan, I know. But I thought at least if I said something, she’d know that someone was on to her, and no more children would disappear.”

  Liam said through gritted teeth as he packed up the rest of the first aid supplies, “You do realize that if Maya is involved, you have just warned her that you know she is involved, and that will make her much less likely to lead us to the children that have already gone missing.” He didn’t bother to point out that if Maya were really the culprit, Baba might have even put herself in danger; she’d already had a rough enough evening.

  Baba sighed and swung her legs up onto the coffee table, her furry footrest having moved off to nap in front of the refrigerator, as if he was afraid that someone would steal something precious out of it while he slept. A slight snore rattled the cupboards.

  “I said it wasn’t much of a plan, didn’t I?” She let her head droop back onto the crimson velvet cushion behind her, ebony lashes fluttering down to cover those remarkable eyes. “It is remotely possible that I may have acted a tad hastily. It’s only that I keep thinking about those children . . .”

  Liam swallowed back all the retorts that had been about to zip out of his mouth like angry bees. “Yeah. I get that.” He shook his head, forgetting that Baba’s eyes were still closed and she couldn’t see him. Then he had to push that damned hair out of the way again. Any day now, he was going to find time to get it cut. Like when he was applying for another job because he’d been fired from this one.

  “You know, you could have waited,” he said, trying not to let his frustration at her lack of faith in him show. After all, they’d just met; how was she to know that he took every lead seriously? Even hers. “I did actually check Ms. Freeman out more thoroughly, and everything looks perfect. No history of trouble with the law, excellent references from her last job—not so much as a parking ticket.”

  Baba sat up, grimacing a little, and turned to face him. She leaned in closer, until he could feel the heat coming off her body, and locked eyes with him.

  “Sheriff,” she said, her tone level and matter-of-fact. “If you did the same for me, I assure you, all my information would look perfect too. But almost all of it is a lie. Some people have ways of getting around the truth, ways you can’t possibly understand. But you can take my word for it: Maya is not at all what she seems.”

  Liam believed her, although that in itself was almost as disturbing as the fact that she’d just admitted to lying to him. “What, so are you saying that you and Maya are both in the CIA, or the Mafia or something?”

  Baba leaned back again, that teasing half smile flitting across her lips. “Oh, no, Sheriff, something much worse than that.” For a moment, it almost seemed as though she was going to add something, until the sound of ringing broke the moment and chased the words away.

  NINE

  BABA HAD TO swallow a laugh at the look of stunned amazement on Liam’s face. He pulled out his phone and gazed at it as though i
t had been transmuted into a kaleidoscope, or some other completely unexpected object.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said, still staring at the ringing object in his palm. “I never get service out here.”

  “Must be magic,” Baba said lightly. “Aren’t you going to answer that?”

  He shook himself and flipped the phone open. She tried without success to follow his half of the conversation, which mostly consisted of variations on, “Yup, uh-huh, that’s great.” Chudo-Yudo roused himself with a dragonish snort and meandered over to find out what was going on, bringing Baba another beer. This one had a sizable chunk missing from the neck, but she nudged it back into place with a finger flick before Liam could notice.

  “It’s Bob,” Liam said, pulling the phone away from his ear for a moment. “From the auto shop. I had him go out and pick up your bike.”

  Baba bit back a sharp reply. Nobody touched her motorcycle but her. Chudo-Yudo growled softly and she gave him an imperceptible shake of the head. The sheriff meant well, and she could reclaim it in the morning when she was back up to full strength. Or in the middle of the night, if she was really feeling twitchy about it.

  Liam continued, blissfully unaware of how close he’d come to getting his ass handed to him on a platter. “Bob says the damage isn’t as bad as it looks. The frame isn’t twisted, and he can mend the front fender, bend the handlebars back into shape, and replace the tire. A decent paint job will take longer, but you should be back on the road in a week or so.” He gave her a broad, white smile, clearly proud of himself.

  Baba vacillated between irritation that he’d dealt with the issue without her permission and gratitude that the motorcycle wasn’t as badly mangled as it had first appeared.