The smile slid away like a shadow in a storm. “The Baba at least fed me well, and made sure I was warm and dry. Unless we were out tramping through the woods and fields in the rain or snow, which was often.” She shrugged, and a stray lock of night-colored hair fell over his hand, feeling like silk.
“Was she at least kind to you?” Liam asked, caught up in a vision of a tiny, solitary child trudging stoically after a crone like the one he’d met the day before, struggling to carry a basket almost as big as she was filled with dirt-encrusted herbs and odd-colored mushrooms.
Baba shrugged again. “Kind, cruel. I doubt she knew the difference. Babas live a long time, and mine had waited until near the end of her life to take on an apprentice. By then, she wasn’t very good at Human emotions anymore, either expressing them or understanding them. She taught me well, and kept me from harm; affection never really entered into the equation. And having spent the beginning of my life in the orphanage, I didn’t know enough to expect it.”
A sip of wine covered some spasm of emotion she doubtless hoped he wouldn’t see—regret, maybe, or sorrow.
“I grew up without some of the essential foundations that make a human being Human,” she said softly. “I know I’m not very good with people, or making connections. We moved around a lot, in the Baba’s hut on chicken legs, going to wherever she was called, or was in the mood to be.”
Liam reached out, caressed her cheek for a brief moment. She leaned into him for a moment before pulling away. “You seem plenty human to me, Baba. And folks around here liked you just fine before Maya started her campaign to discredit you. Belinda and the Ivanovs still do. And just yesterday Bertie actually kicked someone out of her diner for daring to call you a witch within her hearing.”
Baba looked at him, blinking rapidly. “She did?”
He nodded, dropping his hand back down as if he’d accidentally touched the sun. “Didn’t you get lonely as a child?”
“Not really,” she said, sitting up straighter and jerking off her boots. Chudo-Yudo ducked as one went sailing over his head. “Ah, that’s better.”
Liam smiled. He got a kick out of the fact that she hated to wear shoes, although he couldn’t have said why. Just part of who she was.
“I had the Riders as friends, when they came to visit my Baba, and Koshei.” A slight flush turned her tanned cheeks rosy for a brief moment, then vanished. “And Chudo-Yudo, of course.”
Liam raised an eyebrow. “Every girl should have a dog. Even if he is part dragon.”
Chudo-Yudo coughed a tiny spurt of flame, singeing Liam’s shoe. “Dude—I’m all dragon. I just look like a damned dog. Try and keep this stuff straight, will ya?”
“I’m trying,” Liam said, “Really, I’m trying.” He looked at Baba. “So the old Baba raised you, and taught you about herbs, and uh, all that other stuff?”
“Magic, yes.” She bit her lip, trying not to laugh at him. “It’s not as bizarre as you think. More like a type of science you simply haven’t learned enough about to comprehend.”
That actually made a kind of twisted sense to him. “You mean like physics? I never could wrap my mind around physics.”
Her smile finally reached her mysterious eyes, washing away some of the sadness there. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Most of what people believe about physics isn’t true anyway.” She pointed at Chudo-Yudo. “That whole ‘conservation of mass’ thing? How on earth could a dragon with a ten-foot wingspan become an only-slightly-larger-than-normal pit bull?” She snorted. “Physics. Bah.”
Liam pushed his hair back out of his eyes again. He wasn’t sure if it was good or bad that Baba was starting to make sense to him.
“Is there anything else you need to know?” she asked. “I don’t want us to have any more secrets between us. I want you to be able to trust me to help.”
Secrets. He looked down at his shoes, one of which now bore a large charred spot, and thought about the things he hadn’t told her about. Melissa, in particular. The truth was, he didn’t think he could ever trust another woman after what he’d been through with Melissa. Not even one he had to fight the urge to kiss every time he got within two feet of her. He opened his mouth to say something; to reward her story, which had clearly taken courage for her to tell, with his own.
What came out instead was, “I don’t suppose you have any pie?”
* * *
BABA SUPPRESSED A surge of irritation. She tells him her life story, and his only response is to ask for pie? Seriously?
“Pie?” she said, sparks flickering dangerously at the tips of her fingers. “You want pie now?”
The man had the nerve to grin at her, that elusive dimple flashing at the corner of his lips. “Well,” he said in a practical tone, as if he wasn’t ten seconds away from being set on fire, “we’ll need to keep our strength up if we’re going to be out tomorrow and who knows how many other days, watching the two kids we think Maya is most likely to target next.”
Oh. “Does that mean you’ve decided to trust me after all?” she asked, the sparks dying away harmlessly.
Liam sighed. “It means I realized I’ve trusted you all along. I’ve just been letting my discomfort with the idea of magic and the Otherworld and all that comes with it get in the way of my common sense and my instincts.” After all, it was a simple thing to trust her to help, really. Just so long as he didn’t have to trust her with his heart.
He looked for someplace to put his empty beer bottle down, and Baba made it disappear with a snap of her fingers. Liam jerked. “See—like that! I will never get used to that.” But he smiled as he said it. “Now how about that pie? Or I’ll settle for cookies or some ice cream, if you don’t have pie. Man can’t live on hot dogs alone, you know.”
“Dogs can’t either,” Chudo-Yudo said, endeavoring to look pitiful. A pretty difficult look for a two-hundred-pound pit to pull off, no matter how cute he was.
“Fine, I’ll check,” Baba said, and got up to look in the refrigerator. “Well, there’s pie,” she said, not terribly surprised. “But I hope you didn’t want milk to go with that, because apparently we’re all out.”
Liam wandered over to have a look, and burst out laughing at the sight of what must have been dozens of pies, all stacked on top of each other.
Chudo-Yudo made a disgusted noise. “They’re all cherry. I hate cherry pie.”
“Sorry, baby,” Baba said, patting him on the head and nudging a couple of pies out of the way to make sure that the bottle with the Water of Life and Death was still in there. She eyed it speculatively for a minute, giving Liam a look that made him ask with alarm, “What?”
“Nothing, nothing.” She couldn’t exactly tell him that she was thinking that the magical water could extend his life, so he could live it out with her. As if. Baba grabbed one of the pies and plopped it on the counter, pulling out some Limoges plates and silver forks to go with it. It was too soon to even consider such a thing. She must be losing her mind. It was just that when he stood that close to her, it made it nearly impossible to think at all.
“Well, if all there is is cherry,” Chudo-Yudo said, growling menacingly at the stainless steel fridge, which responded by showing his reflection with a pink tutu and fairy wings, “I’m going to go outside and pee on things.” He stalked over to the front door, making hideous faces at it until it opened with a reluctant squeal and then slammed shut behind him.
Baba ignored all the drama out of long habit, although Liam’s face held a slightly shell-shocked look. She hid a smile behind masses of dark hair.
“I hope you like cherry,” she said, cutting them each a precisely equal slice and sliding them onto plates. “Apparently that was what the Airstream was in the mood for.”
They went back over to the couch and sat down next to each other, knees almost touching. Liam forked up a bite and made a blissful noise deep in his throat that se
nt shivers down Baba’s spine. She didn’t even taste the bite she ate, distracted by the way his eyes closed slightly as he savored the sweet-sour tang of the fruit.
“You know,” he said, when he’d devoured most of it, “I envy you a little.”
Baba blinked, confused. “You want a magic refrigerator?” She swallowed a tiny mouthful of glistening red paradise, licking the juice off one finger where it had fallen.
Liam laughed. “Hell no. I’m happy enough with regular appliances like my simple, everyday toaster. You put bread in, you get toast out; that’s magic enough for me.”
She narrowed her eyes at the toaster sitting on her counter, which sometimes popped out a piece of toast (although not always of the type you put in), but was just as likely to toss out a bagel, a buttered croissant, or on one memorable occasion, spaghetti Alfredo. Man, and hadn’t that been a nightmare to clean up.
“I see your point. Then what do you envy?”
Liam gestured around the Airstream. “All this. You travel around the country; no roots, no ties, having all sorts of adventures and meeting new people. It must be nice not to constantly have folks tugging at you, expecting you to solve all their problems for them, knowing everything about you down to whether you wear boxers or briefs.”
Baba raised an eyebrow, and he flushed a little.
“Briefs. But that’s not my point.”
She smiled. “But that’s what you like about this place, isn’t it? It’s home. And solving people’s problems is your job. I thought you liked that too.” She would not think about Liam, naked except for a skimpy pair of briefs. She stuffed some more pie into her mouth as a distraction.
“I do, mostly.” He sighed. “When I don’t have Clive Matthews and the county board breathing down my neck, and children disappearing right and left.” Outside the open window, an owl hooted, and the shadow of a wing seemed to glide across his face.
“But I’ve lived here all my life,” he continued, stealing a forkful of Baba’s pie, now that all of his was gone. “Except for a short stint in the military when I was young. Everyone knows me and my business, and thinks they know how I should live my life. There’s a certain freedom in anonymity; maybe I envy you that.”
A sliver of something caught in Baba’s throat; maybe a tiny fragment of a cherry pit. Or a glimmer of irrational hope. Fracture lines appeared in the wall she’d built around her heart, as if an earthquake rocked the world all unseen.
“Have you ever thought about just picking up and leaving?” she asked casually. “If they’re going to fire you in a couple of weeks anyway, there’s nothing to stop you, is there?”
“There was a time, a few years ago, when I seriously considered moving out of town,” he admitted.
Surprise made her blurt out, “Really? What on earth happened?” Despite their current conversation, she couldn’t imagine Liam without Dunville. Or for that matter, Dunville without him.
He hesitated, looking down at his hands as if the calluses there held some kind of map to guide him through the minefield of his memories. “I had a baby,” he said slowly, voice low. “A little girl. She died. SIDS—you know, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. It was . . . terrible. One day she was alive, smiling and kicking out with tiny feet and grabbing onto my finger with her strong little hands. The next she was gone. Dead in her crib. I wasn’t even home when it happened; out on a late-night call trying to keep some drunken asshole from breaking up a bar.”
His face was so sad, Baba’s chest contracted with sympathetic pain.
“It destroyed my marriage. Just about destroyed me, to be honest. The pity was the worst. Everyone knows, and everyone is sorry, so sorry. For a while, around then, I thought about leaving.” He shrugged. “But the job was the one thing that kept me sane, and people needed me, which gave me a reason to get up in the morning. So I stayed.”
Baba realized that at some point during his agonizing recitation, she’d taken his hands, or he’d taken hers. The plates and forks were nowhere to be seen, although she didn’t remember removing them.
“That’s awful,” she said. “I can’t imagine losing a child. No wonder it bothers you so much that other people are losing theirs.” He grimaced, and she squeezed his hands a little tighter. They felt good under her fingers; strong and capable, large without being clumsy. She could envision them mending a fence or cradling a rescued kitten. Or doing other things, preferably to her.
“Time passes. You adjust,” he said, straightening up and pulling his hands back so that he could run them through his too-long hair, moving it off his face in what was clearly becoming a habitual movement. She tucked hers under her arms, suddenly cold, moving away from him to curl her legs up underneath her.
“Still, I could see why you would want to get away, to someplace where there were no memories. Start over again.” She stared at the wall across the room, as if a pattern on the wallpaper there had somehow become more fascinating than usual, its subtle cream silk moiré holding all the secrets of the universe if only you looked long enough in the right light. “You could come with us, you know. Travel the country with me and Chudo-Yudo for a bit.”
Liam made a slight choking sound; surprise or pleasure or alarm, she couldn’t tell.
“Like you said that first day, almost every piece of furniture in the Airstream folds out to be a sleeping space.” She waved a hand around with an airiness she didn’t quite feel. “If you were going to be around long enough, I could even have it create an extra room for you. I’m sure Chudo-Yudo would like to have someone else to talk to besides me.” She shrugged. “It might be fun.”
Liam brushed one large hand gently across her cheek again, smoothing back her cloud of raven hair with a gesture that was surprisingly erotic in its simplicity. For a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her.
“It does sound like fun,” he said, with something that sounded like regret. But maybe that was only what she wanted to hear. “Very tempting. But I can’t go anywhere until those children are back home where they belong, whether or not I’m dealing with the case in an official capacity or not. And as much as the town sometimes drives me crazy, I suppose this is where I belong.”
Baba mustered up a smile. “I guess I knew that. It was just a silly notion. I’ve lived alone for such a long time, I doubt I could stand to have anyone else around on a day-to-day basis anyway.”
“Anyone who didn’t shed white fur or breathe fire, you mean.” Liam smiled back.
“Right.”
He gazed into her eyes for a minute, and then asked hesitantly, “Do Babas ever settle down in one place? Stop traveling and set down roots?”
She snorted. “Not exactly. Back in the Old Country, when there were more of us in a smaller area, each Baba tended to have her own territory she watched over. Her hut would travel around within a certain boundary, but never strayed all that far, so people could find her if they wanted to badly enough.”
“Here, though,” she circled her arm to indicate the whole country, and not just the trailer they sat in, “there are so few of us, we tend to travel wherever we are needed.”
“Doesn’t that make it difficult to teach your classes?” Liam asked. “Or are they just part of the illusion?”
“Ha. They’re mostly a cover, although I do teach a class every once in a while when I get a chance. I actually like doing it. But I’m almost always officially off on sabbatical; traveling, researching, collecting samples.” She gestured at the many jars and bottles and leafy green things tucked into corners and in some cases hanging off cast iron hooks on the walls.
“There are only three of us Babas in the entire United States, so we just go where we are called. That’s how I ended up here.”
“Good grief,” Liam said, taken aback. “Wouldn’t it be more efficient to divide the country up into thirds, with one of you taking the eastern part of the country, one the middle, and
one the west?”
“I suppose so,” Baba said, brow wrinkled. “No one has ever suggested it before. And at the moment, two of us are actually based out of California, so I’m not sure how we’d decide who got which territory.” She shifted one shoulder carelessly. “Besides, why bother? Things are working well enough the way they are.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Liam said in an echo of the casual tone she’d used earlier. “I just thought maybe you’d want to settle down someday. Don’t Babas ever do that?”
“Some do,” she said, thinking about it. “Usually when they are training the next Baba in line. It’s too hard on a young child, moving around constantly like that. Then the other Babas tend to cover the calls that come from too far away. Honestly, I’ve never really thought about it much. It never seemed like the right time.”
His hazel eyes gazed into hers for one long minute. “Is there anything that might make you think about it?”
Somehow her hands had found their way back into his again. Her heart beat against the inside of her chest like a caged bird trying to escape. The colors of his irises changed from blue to green to gray like the ocean, promising adventures completely different from any she’d experienced in her long, wandering life.
Then he leaned in and kissed her, placing one strong hand on either side of her face with surprising gentleness and sliding his lips slowly over hers. Heat roared up from her belly as if she’d walked into a volcano, the molten lava of lust and wanting rising up inside of her like a force of nature.
She kissed him back with enthusiasm, almost growling from the joy of finally having him in her arms, and she could feel the curve of his smile under her lips.
“God, I want you,” he said, pulling back and gazing at her with darkened eyes. “I think I’ve wanted you since the first day I saw you, standing next to that motorcycle in all that leather with this amazing hair floating down around your shoulders.” He ran his hands through her dark tresses as if they were some precious silk from far-off lands.
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