“I see that.”
“I figured I’d let you know, since you must be blind. Maybe you could practice by aiming at a barn.”
A bowstring twanged. I ducked back behind the tree. An arrow sliced the leaves a hair left of the oak. He was good, but not great. Andrea would’ve nailed me by now.
“You alive?” he called out.
“Yep. Still breathing. You missed again, hotshot.”
“Look, I have no problem with you. Give me the damn rabbit and I’ll let you go.”
Fat chance. “This is my rabbit. Get your own.”
“It’s not your rabbit. It’s the witch’s rabbit.”
Figured. “You got a problem with the witch?”
“Yeah, I got a problem.”
If Evdokia wanted him dead, he would be dead by now. This was her forest. She hadn’t killed him, which meant she was amused by his antics, or worse, he was a relative or a son of a friend. Injuring him was out of the question, or I could kiss good-bye any chance of cooperation from Evdokia.
“Last chance to give me the rabbit and walk away from this.”
“No.”
“Suit yourself.”
A shrill whistle burst through the woods, lancing my eardrums. It drowned all sound and shot up, higher and higher, to an impossible intensity. I clamped my hands over my ears.
The whistle built on itself, slicing the petals off wildflowers to the left and right of the oak, stabbing through my hands into my brain. The world faded. I tasted blood in my mouth.
The whistle stopped.
The sudden quiet was deafening.
Russian fairy tales talked of a Nightingale Bandit, able to bend trees with his whistling. I seemed to have run into the real-life version.
“You alive?” he called out.
Barely. “Yep.” I dug in my brain, trying to recall the old Russian folk tales. Did he have any weakness . . . if he had, I couldn’t remember any. “You whistle so prettily. Do you do weddings?”
“In five seconds I’m going to split that tree down the middle and you with it. Hard to make jokes with your lungs full of blood.”
I slid a throwing knife from the sheath on my belt and sneaked a glance. He sat in a tree, one leg under him, the other dangling down. Relaxed and easy.
“Fine, you got me. I’m coming out.”
“With the rabbit?”
“With the rabbit.” I slipped a throwing knife in my hand, flipped it, and rustled the weeds to my left with my foot. The Nightingale leaned to the side, trying to get a better look. I lunged right and threw the knife. The blade sliced through the air. The wooden handle smashed into his throat. The Nightingale made a small gurgling sound. I sprinted to the tree, grabbed his ankle, and jerked him down. He crashed to the ground like a log. I hit him in the throat a couple of times to make sure he stayed quiet, flipped him on his stomach, yanked a plastic tie from my pocket, and tied his hands together.
“Don’t go anywhere.”
He gurgled something.
I circled the tree and ran into a horse tied to the branch, its head swaddled in some sort of canvas. A coil of rope waited on the saddle. Wasn’t that nice.
I snagged the rope and hauled the Nightingale upright against the tree, facing the bark. He was short but well-muscled, his dark hair cut down to a mere fuzz on his head.
A hoarse gasp issued from his mouth. “Bloody bitch.”
“That’s nice.” I finished tying him to the trunk. He couldn’t even turn his head. “Just remember, it could’ve been the other end of the knife.”
I stepped back. He looked secure enough. I sliced the tie off and dangled it by the bark so he could see it. “I’m going to go see the witch now. In your place, I’d try to get free. I might be in a bad mood on my way back. Come on, bunny.”
The rabbit hopped down the path and I followed it, listening to the sweet serenade of curses.
THE STICK WAS SIX FEET TALL AND TOPPED WITH A grimy human skull, decorated by a half-melted candle. It jutted on the side of the road, like some grisly path marker. A few feet past it another yellowed skull offered a second candle. Some people used tiki torches. Some people used human skulls . . .
I looked at the duck-bunny. “What have you gotten me into?”
The duck-bunny rubbed his nose.
The skull looked a bit odd. For one, all the teeth were even. I stood on my toes and knocked on the bony temple. Plastic. Heh.
The bunny hopped down the trail. Nothing to do but follow.
The path opened into a garden. To the left, raspberry bushes rose next to gooseberry and currant. To the right, neat rows of strawberries sat, punctuated by spears of garlic and onion to keep the bugs off. Trees rose here and there, surrounded by herbs. I recognized apple, pear, cherry. Past it all, at the end of a winding path in the middle of a green lawn, sat a large log house. Rather, the back of the large log house. A couple of clean glass windows stared at me above a wraparound porch rail, but no door was visible.
We stopped at the house. Now what?
“Knock-knock?”
The ground shuddered under my feet. I took a step back. The edge of the porch quaked and rose, up and up, rocking a little, and beneath it huge scaled legs dug into the ground with talons the size of my arms.
Holy shit.
The legs moved, turning the house with ponderous slowness ten feet above the ground: corner, wall, another corner, Evdokia in a rocking chair sitting on the porch.
“That’s good,” the witch said.
The house crouched down and settled back in place. Evdokia gave me a sweet smile. Middle-aged, she was plump and looked happy about it. Her face was round, her stomach was round, and a thick braid of brown hair snaked its way over her shoulder down to her lap. She was knitting some sort of a tube out of strawberry-colored yarn.
There was only one person in the entire Slavic mythology who had a house on chicken legs: Baba Yaga, the Grandmother Witch, the one with a stone leg and iron teeth. She was known for flying around in a mortar and for casual cannibalism of wandering heroes. And I’d walked to her house on my own power. Talk about delivering takeout.
Evdokia nodded to the chair next to her. “Well, come on. V nogah pravdi nyet.”
No truth in legs. Right. Will you walk into my parlour, said the spider to the fly . . .
Her smile got wider. “Scared?”
“Nope.” I walked up the steps and took the chair. The house jerked, my stomach jumped, and the garden dropped down below. The house had straightened its chicken legs. Trapped. No matter. “Besides, I’m all gristle and tough meat anyway.”
She chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know, you might be just right for a nice big pot of borscht. Throw some mushrooms in there and mmm.”
Borscht, bleah.
“Not a fan?” Evdokia reached to the small table between us, poured two cups of tea, and handed me one.
“No.” I sipped. Great tea. I waited a moment to see if I turned into a goat. Nope, no horns, clothes were still there. I raised the cup at her. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. You hate borscht because Voron never made it properly. I swear, anything you gave that man, he’d turn into mush. It took me the longest time to get him to eat normal food. For a while it was all ‘borscht and taters.’ ”
The bunny hopped onto her lap. Her fingers brushed the dark fur. Flesh and fur seethed, twisting into a new body, and a small black cat rolled on her back on Evdokia’s lap and batted at her fingers with soft paws.
For a moment the witch’s control slipped, and I glimpsed magic wrapped around her like a dense shawl before she hid it again. If this went sour, getting off this porch alive would be a bitch.
“Now, go on,” Evdokia said. “You’re tangling my yarn.”
The kitten rolled off, jumped to the porch rail, licked her paw, and began washing herself. An all-purpose pet. How do you turn a duck into a bunny? I didn’t even know where to start.
The needles clicked in the older woman’s hands. “Had
any trouble finding your way?”
“Not really. Ran into a Nightingale Bandit, but that’s about it.”
“Vyacheslav. Slava, for short. He’s angry because I won’t let him rob people on my land. Slava talks a big game but he’s harmless.”
He split solid trees into splinters and made people’s ears bleed with a supersonic whistle, but of course, he was completely harmless. Silly me, worrying for nothing.
Evdokia nodded at the platter of cookies. “Have one.”
In for a penny, in for a pound. I snagged a cookie and bit into it. It broke in my mouth into a light powder of sweet vanilla crumbs, melting on my tongue, and suddenly I was five years old. I’d eaten those before when I was very little, and that taste jerked me right back into the past. A tall woman laughed somewhere to the side and called me. “Katenka!”
I shrugged her out of my mind. No time for a trip down the memory lane.
For a couple of minutes we sat quietly. The air smelled of flowers and a hint of something fruity. The tea was hot and tasted of lemon. It all seemed so . . . nice. I sneaked a glance at the witch. She seemed absorbed in her knitting. I needed to get on with the volhv questions.
Evdokia glanced at me. “Have you heard from your father? He isn’t going to let his sister’s death go.”
I dropped my cup and caught it an inch from the porch boards.
“Nice catch.” Evdokia pulled her yarn to give herself more slack.
My mouth was dry. I set the cup very carefully on the table. “How did you know?” How much do you know? Who else knows? How many people do I have to kill?
“About your father? You told me.”
I chose my words very carefully. “I don’t recall that.”
“We were sitting right here. You had sugar cookies and tea and you told me all about how your daddy killed your mom, and how you had to get strong and murder him one day. You were all of six years old. And then Voron came and made you run laps around the garden. Do you remember me at all?”
I strained, trying to dig deep into my memories. A woman looked down at me, very tall, with bright red hair braided into a long plait over her shoulder, a black cat rubbing on her feet. Her eyes were blue and they laughed at me. A hint of a voice came, happy, offering me a cookie in Russian.
“I remember a woman . . . red hair . . . with cookies.”
Evdokia nodded. “That was me.”
“There was a cat.” I vividly remembered a leather collar with the Russian word for “Kitty” written on it in black marker. I’d written it.
“Kisa. She died seven years ago. She was an old cat.”
“You were tall.”
“No, you were a short little thing. I was the same size, except I was skinny back then. And I dyed my hair fire-red so your stepdad would like me. I was a lot dumber in my youth. Voron, he seemed a proper man.” Evdokia sighed. “Very strong, handsome. Dependable. I really liked him and I tried. Oy, how I tried. But it wasn’t meant to be.”
“Why not?”
“For one, it was all about your mother. A living woman I could handle, but fighting for your father with a dead one, well, that was a fight I couldn’t win. For another, your father wasn’t the man I thought he was.”
“What do you mean?”
Evdokia raised the teakettle and refilled my cup. “Sugar?”
“No, thank you.”
“You should have some. I’m about to speak ill of the dead. Sugar helps with the bitter.”
She and Doolittle were separated at birth. Every time I suffered a near-death experience, he brought me syrup and claimed it was iced tea.
The older woman leaned back, gazing at the garden. “When I first saw you, you were two years old. You were such a cute, fat baby. Big eyes. Then Voron left and took you with him. I saw you again when you were four and then some months after, and then again. Every time I saw you, you got harder and harder. I’d braid your hair and put you in a pretty little dress and we’d go to Solstice Day, or out to our coven, and you would be so happy. Then he’d return and make you take it all off, and send you out to hunt feral dogs with a knife. You’d come back all bloody and sit by his feet like some sort of puppy, waiting for him to tell you that you’d done well.”
I remembered that, sitting by Voron’s feet. He didn’t praise me often, but when he did, it was like I’d grown wings. I would’ve done anything for that praise.
“Finally Anna Ivanovna called me to come and see her. You were seven then and she was an Oracle Witch at the time. Old, old woman, frightening eyes. I took you with me. We visited at her house and she looked at you for a while, and then she said that it wasn’t right what Voron was doing to you. It never sat well with me, and I’m not one to hold my tongue, so I cornered him that night over dinner and told him so. I told him that you were a little girl. An innocent. That if you were his own flesh and blood, he wouldn’t be treating you this way.”
If this was true, she stood up to Voron for my sake. Few people would. “He made me this way so I would survive. It was a necessity.”
Evdokia pursed her lips for a long moment. A shadow darkened her eyes. Something inside me clenched, as if expecting a punch.
“What did Voron say?”
Evdokia looked down at her knitting.
“What did he say?”
“He said that you weren’t his flesh and blood, and that was the whole point.”
It hurt. It was the truth and I’d known it all my life, but it still hurt. He was my father in everything but blood. He cared about me, in his own way; he . . .
“I told him that the Covens would take you in,” Evdokia said. “He said no. So I asked him what did he think would happen when you and Roland finally met. He told me that if he got lucky, you’d kill your father. If his luck ran out, then Roland would have to murder his own daughter and that was enough for him.”
A sharp pain stabbed me somewhere right below the heart. My throat closed up.
It wasn’t true. That conversation never took place. Voron loved my mother. She died for me. He trained me to make me stronger so that when the final confrontation came, I’d hold my own against my real father.
Anger vibrated in Evdokia’s voice. “I told him to get out. I thought he’d cool off and I’d persuade him to give you to me. But he vanished and took you with him. The next time I saw you, you came to ask for a favor in the Belly of the Turtle. I almost didn’t recognize you. It’s not what we wanted for you. I know it wasn’t all him. Kalina had ruined him, but I blame Voron all the same. It was his fault as well.”
I struggled to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out. I felt helpless, as if I were stuck in the middle of some void and couldn’t break out of it.
“You were one of ours. We would’ve taken you in and hid you and taught you, but it was not to be. It gnaws at me to this day that I couldn’t get you away from him.”
My mouth finally managed to produce a sound. “What do you mean, one of yours?”
“Because of your mother, of course.”
I stared at her.
Evdokia gasped. “He didn’t tell you, that pridurok. Kalina, your mother, she was one of ours. An old Ukrainian family. Your grandmother’s sister, Olyona, married my uncle Igor. We’re in-laws.”
The world jumped up and kicked me in the face.
CHAPTER 10
“THEY’RE FROM A SMALL SETTLEMENT ON THE BORDER of Ukraine and Poland,” Evdokia said. “Zeleniy Hutir. It has been a bad place to live since antiquity. The border there jumps back and forth; one generation they’d be Polish, the next Russian, then Turkish, then something else. Legend says, in savage times, back when Ukraine was home to Slavic tribes, they made war with the Khazarian Empire to the east. During one of those raids, all the men from the village were taken. Magic was still in the world back then, although it was growing weaker, and the old ways were strong in the area. The women worked a charm on themselves, the power of enchantment, to make people want to please them. They got their men back. The powe
r came with a huge price—most of them went barren after that—but if they wanted the shirt off your back, all they had to do was smile and you’d give it to them. That’s where your mother’s power comes from.”
That sounded suspiciously familiar. “There is a woman working for the People. Her name is Rowena.”
Evdokia nodded. “I’ve seen her. Same ancestry, but watered down. Her magic is like a fireplace; if you stand real close, you’ll feel the warmth. Nothing to write home about. Your mother’s magic was like a bonfire. It didn’t just warm, it burned.”
That would be a hell of a power.
“A lot of us, the old families that came over here from Russia and Ukraine, have known we were magical,” Evdokia continued. “Even when the technology was at its peak, just before the Shift, a tiny trickle of magic still remained in the world and we saw its effects and we used it, in the small ways. The old women would spell a toothache away, find the drowned bodies, or meddle in people’s love lives. I had a friend whose mother once dreamed that their house would catch on fire. Two days later her senile grandfather poured kerosene into their stove to get the fire going. Almost burned the whole place down. Small things like that.
“Your grandmother had the power but didn’t use it. She got a doctorate in psychology and didn’t truck with any of the old superstition, as she called it. She pushed Kalina the same way, except by the time your mother finished all her degrees, the magic was here to stay and she’d come into her power. She was very good at what she did. She used to lecture all over the country. Universities, military, cops. She did all that.”
A light went on in my head. That had to be how she met Greg, my guardian. “Did she work with the Order?”
Evdokia nodded. “Oh yes. They tried hard to recruit her, too. Then she met your father, your real father, and all that went by the wayside. She vanished.”
“Do you think she loved him?”
“I don’t know,” the old witch said. “We were never too close. Kalina’s magic leaked, even when she kept it in check, and I don’t take kindly to having my emotions jerked around. I’d seen her once since she went to stay with Roland—she’d come back for her mother’s funeral. She seemed happy. Secure, like a woman who is well taken care of, loved, and isn’t too worried about tomorrow.”
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