Berkley Sensation titles by Deborah Blake
WICKEDLY DANGEROUS
WICKEDLY WONDERFUL
WICKEDLY POWERFUL
DANGEROUSLY CHARMING
DANGEROUSLY DIVINE
VEILED MAGIC
(an InterMix eBook)
VEILED MENACE
(an InterMix eBook)
Novellas
WICKEDLY MAGICAL
WICKEDLY EVER AFTER
(an InterMix eBook)
WICKEDLY SPIRITED
(an InterMix eBook)
Wickedly Spirited
A Baba Yaga Novella
Deborah Blake
INTERMIX
NEW YORK
INTERMIX
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by Deborah Blake
Excerpt from Dangerously Divine © 2017 by Deborah Blake
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INTERMIX and the “IM” design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
ISBN: 9780399586125
First Edition: September 2017
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Berkley Sensation titles by Deborah Blake
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Excerpt from Dangerously Divine
About the Author
Chapter One
“It’s not fair,” Jazz said in that indignant tone specific to teenagers, even ones who were studying to become powerful witches.
“Probably not,” Bella agreed. “Many things aren’t.” She’d been dealing with Jazz for about six months now, since she’d first found the girl wandering alone in a forest. Bella had learned a lot about patience in that time. Her own Baba Yaga mentor would have been proud. Shocked, but proud. “Are we talking about something special or life in general?”
An eye roll greeted this perfectly reasonable question.
“I’m talking about the Riders,” Jazz said. “It’s not fair that they’re not immortal anymore.”
Bella sighed. She agreed, of course, but they’d had this discussion numerous times and the facts hadn’t changed. “No, it’s not. It isn’t fair that an evil former Baba Yaga tortured them and stole their immortality. Nor that she nearly killed both of us in the process. But Brenna is dead, and we’re fine, and the Riders are . . . adjusting. Things could have turned out a lot worse.”
In truth, things had in some ways turned out pretty well. Bella had met her husband, Sam, during the course of that particular nightmare, and found Jazz, who had enough magical potential that even the usually traditional High Queen of the Otherworld had broken with convention and agreed to let Bella train Jazz to be a Baba Yaga, though such instruction was usually started in early childhood. Probably because small children were considerably more malleable than snarky teenagers.
As for the Riders, well, Mikhail Day was happy and settled in his new life, and Gregori Sun seemed as calm as ever the last time she’d seen him, although with Gregori that didn’t mean much. He was always calm. They were no longer Riders, the trusted companions and helpers to the Baba Yagas, but as Bella had stated, they had adjusted. Mostly. Hopefully.
“What about Alexei?” Jazz said with a scowl. “No one has heard from him in months. He didn’t even show up for his brother’s wedding. He’s not adjusting.”
No, he isn’t. “He sent a gift and a note,” Bella said. “Gregori didn’t come either. They are both still healing, one way or the other. Mikhail found his way. They will too. Eventually.”
“It’s not fair,” Jazz repeated. “They’ve been helping the Baba Yagas for centuries and none of you are doing anything.” She crossed her arms and glared at Bella across the worktable they had been using to practice creating a complicated elixir for healing damaged waterways. “You and Barbara and Beka are three of the most powerful witches in the world. You should be working on a magical solution. You should fix them.”
Bella shook her head, long red hair curling into her face. “Don’t you think we would if we could?” She closed her eyes briefly to hide the pain in them from her apprentice. “We all adore the Riders.” She refused to think of them any other way, though technically they no longer carried that title. “Even the Queen said there was nothing that could reverse the damage Brenna did. I know it is hard to accept, Jazz, but even magic can’t fix everything. Mikhail, Gregori, and Alexei are mortal now, and there is nothing any of us can do about it.”
Bella sighed. “There is, however, a great deal that can be done to make up for the years of training you missed out on. But only if you are willing to concentrate.” Bella purposely avoided looking at the still-smoking ruins of their first try at the potion. A moment’s inattention could have dire consequences when one was dealing with powerful elemental magic.
Another eye roll. “Fine, but I still think you could find a solution if you were willing to try.”
“And I still think ice cream shouldn’t have any calories if you eat it out of a cone instead of a bowl,” Bella retorted. “But so far, my thinking that hasn’t appeared to make it so. Can we get back to work, please?” She opened a new jar of rose hips and pushed it across the table. “And this time let’s have a little more herbcraft and a little less pyrotechnics.”
“Says the woman who once nearly set the cable guy on fire,” Jazz muttered under her breath.
“He was asking for it,” Bella muttered back. But not loud enough for Jazz to hear. It was hard enough trying to be a good example as it was. No point in giving the girl ideas.
* * *
Jazz looked out the window one more time to make sure Bella was still nowhere in sight before reaching down into one of the caravan’s many hidden cabinets and pulling out a large leather-bound book. The volume was worn with age, the brown leather practically translucent in places where generations of Baba Yagas had held it. Symbols depicting the four elements—Earth, Air, Fire, and Water—were inscribed into the front cover, and the book smelled musty and dusty and generally really freaking old. It had been passed down through the line of Baba Yagas that ended with Bella.
According to Bella, it held incredible power and potential for those who knew how to use the spells and recipes within it, which each Baba added to over the years. Also according to Bella, it was completely off-limits to Jazz unless her teacher was right there, standing over her shoulder to supervise its use. Bella had a lot of rules about magic, most of which Jazz thought were completely ridiculous. It wasn’t as though she was going to actually do anything with the darn book. She just wanted to look at it to see if she could come up with any new ideas for a way that they could reverse the effect of Brenna’s evil. What could it hurt?
After all, Jazz wasn’t a child, although sometimes it felt as though Bella forgot that. Jazz had turned sixteen just last week. Hell, in some cultures, she’d be married with two kids by now. And she’d survived ten years in the foster care system and months on her own in a freaking forest, for god’s sake. Even Bella admitted that Jazz was something of a magical prodigy and was learning all this Baba Yaga stuff at an amazing rate. Not without the occasional mistake, of course, but no one was perfect, and considering that she’d started learning at fifteen instead of five, Jazz thought she was doing pretty darn well. It was really kind of insulting that Bella believed she had to supervise every stupid little thing Jazz did.
Seriously. Where was the trust?
“Whatcha doing?” asked a growly voice from around the area of her knees.
Jazz almost dropped the book. As usual, the damned dragon-cat had snuck up on her without making a sound. She wasn’t sure if that was because he was magic or just because he was a cat (well, at least, a dragon disguised as a gigantic Norwegian Forest cat). Either way, it got on her nerves.
“Jeez,” she said, trying to sound indignant instead of guilty. “Stop doing that. You’re so freaking big, you’d think you’d make more noise.”
“Uh-huh,” Koshka said, not fooled for a minute. “And you’d think you would start listening to your mentor instead of ignoring rules that are there to keep you safe.”
“Pfft. Rules. There are way too many rules around here, if you ask me.”
Koshka bounded effortlessly onto the counter. “Right. Because Bella is so demanding. Like the way she always makes you go to bed at . . . Wait, when is your curfew?”
“Don’t have one,” Jazz muttered. “But since we are always traveling in the woods or the deserts or whatever, it hardly matters, does it?”
“Okay then,” the cat went on relentlessly. “So then there are all those rules about what you have to eat, or making you go to school, or who you can hang out with. You’ve got those ones, right?”
Fine. So the stupid dragon-cat had a point. Sort of. She could have cake for breakfast if she wanted, and as long as she kept up with her online homeschooling assignments, Bella didn’t bug her about homework or anything. Maybe Jazz didn’t have as many rules to deal with as some kids her age, but that was just because most kids her age didn’t live in a traveling caravan half the time and in a cabin in a Wyoming forest the other half.
“Fine,” she admitted. “Bella is pretty cool, mostly. But she’s such a hard-ass about all the magical stuff. Even though I’m really good at it.”
The dragon-cat cocked his head. “Ever think it’s because you’re really good at it? Maybe she’s worried you’ll try to do too much too fast and get hurt. That happens, you know? Not every Baba Yaga in training makes it through to the end. There have been a few spectacular failures. Bella loves you—it’s just possible that she doesn’t want you to be one of them.”
“You mean because she set some poor girl on fire when she was a teenager and, like, not completely in control of her powers?” Jazz said this quietly, since it was something Bella didn’t like to talk about. She had told Jazz the story once, as a warning, but then never brought it up again, and changed the subject any time Jazz tried to talk to her about it. “I’m not going to do that.”
“No, you probably aren’t,” Koshka agreed. “Fire is Bella’s element, not yours, and admittedly, you have better control of your powers than she had at your age, probably because you have a better mentor than she did. But that doesn’t mean you can’t screw up.” He looked pointedly at the book. “Especially if you’re messing around with things you’re not ready for yet.”
“Fine,” Jazz said. “I’ll put the stupid book away.” For now.
“Good,” the dragon-cat said. “Because somebody needs to open a can of tuna before I starve to death. I nominate you.”
* * *
Later, as Jazz and Bella cut up vegetables companionably in the kitchen for dinner, accompanied by the rhythmic sound of Sam chopping wood outside, Jazz tried to come up with a different approach.
The cabin they used as their home base was cozy and warm, although they mostly used the caravan parked outside for their magical work. Sam said it made him feel safer not to have things going poof all around him. Jazz was pretty sure he was joking, although as a plain old Human, he was still getting used to this magic stuff.
Of course, Jazz had been a plain old Human when she met Bella, but now that she was drinking the Water of Life and Death and studying to be a Baba Yaga, those days were behind her. And she’d always believed in magic, even if she’d never seen any proof of it until the day Bella saved her from a fire in the forest by making it rain. Coolest day eveh.
“So, can magic be like cooking?” she asked Bella in as casual a tone as she could manage while cutting up onions.
Bella cocked an eyebrow. “You mean like the way we mix potions?”
“Not exactly.” Jazz pointed at the cookbook open on the table behind them. “I was thinking more of how sometimes when you can’t find exactly the right recipe you want, you take bits from a couple of different ones, and then make up some bits of your own, until you end up with the dish you had in mind.”
“Oh, I see what you mean.” Bella tapped her chin thoughtfully with a spoon, leaving a red streak behind. “Sure. Sometimes you need a spell to do something in particular, and you don’t have one already written, so you either write a new one from scratch or convert one that is close but not quite right. Of course, a lot of the magic we do doesn’t involve spells or potions, just the power generated by our wills.” She grinned at Jazz, affection sparkling in her green eyes. “And you’ve got plenty of that!”
“Are you saying I’m willful?” Jazz teased.
“You’re a teenager. Doesn’t that come with the job description?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jazz said. “I am totally cooperative.”
“Sure,” her mentor said. “If it is Tuesday, and there’s a full moon.” They both laughed.
The truth was, Jazz and Bella got along really well most of the time. Bella was pretty easygoing for a parental substitute, and Jazz was deeply grateful and still kind of amazed that Bella and Koshka and Sam had taken her in and made her part of their family. She hadn’t had one since she was really little, and even in her wildest imaginings, she’d never figured she would end up with people this cool.
All those nights she’d lain awake in uncomfortable beds in crappy foster homes, dreaming about being adopted by nice people—at least in the early days, when she still allowed herself to dream—she could never have anticipated a scenario like this. Sam was awesome too, and he and Bella loved each other so much, it was almost embarrassing to see.
It was a good life, and she knew how lucky she was to be living it. It was just that sometimes she wanted to do even more.
“Can you, like, give me an example?” she asked Bella. “Of how you would mix a couple of spells together?” She tucked her brown hair behind one ear.
Bella stirred the pot of chili on the stove while she thought for a minute. “Okay. I’ve got one. You know how Beka’s elemental powers are strongest for water, right?”
“Sure,” Jazz said. She’d met the youngest of the three Baba Yagas when they had come together to rescue Bella and the Riders. The Baba Yaga in charge of the western third of the country was blond and gorgeous, like someone out of a Hollywood movie. She was also a cool hippie chick whose Chudo-Yudo dragon companion was disguised as a massive black Newfoundland dog, and she’d been really nice to Jazz. “I liked her. She’s not nearly as scary as Barbara.”
Bella laughed. “Honey, no one is as scary as Barbara. It’s her superpower. Anyway, Beka spends a lot of time in the water, and she wanted to be able to open her eyes in the ocean so she could see what she was dealing with. But the salt makes your eyes burn, so
she had to figure out a way to get around that.”
“It does?” Jazz had no idea. “I’ve never been to the ocean.”
Bella paused in midstir. “You haven’t? I didn’t realize. We’ll have to remedy that. Maybe we’ll take a trip to go see Beka if she’s not in the middle of something.” Since Jazz had only been living with Bella and Sam for a while, there were lots of things they were still finding out about one another.
“Really?” Jazz said. “That would be amazing.” And it would be, but she had a mission to accomplish first. “So what did Beka do to make it so she could see underwater?”
“It was actually quite clever,” Bella said. “She took a spell that was intended to be used for clarity of sight—more in a metaphysical way than a literal one—and combined it with a protective spell. Apparently it took a little tweaking, but eventually the two together made a kind of magical invisible lens that fit over her eyes and allowed her to open them underwater without goggles. All she had to do once she had activated the initial spell was say the word that triggered the manifestation of the lenses.”
“Wow. That is clever,” Jazz said, thinking madly. “So in theory, you could combine spells to create anything you needed, if you had the right spells to start out with.”
Bella put down the spoon and turned to face her apprentice. “Sure. If you had the right spells, and if you could find all the right ingredients for those spells, many of which are quite obscure, and if you were a fully trained Baba Yaga with years of experience. Otherwise, you’d be just as likely to create a spell that would accidentally make you see through people’s clothes to their underwear or, worse yet, make yourself go blind except under certain circumstances.”
Bella put her hands on her hips. “Of course, you’re not even close to being ready to do that level of magic.”
Jazz put on her best “who me” look. “I know, I know. You have to walk before you can run, blah blah blah. I was just wondering, that’s all.”
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