Wickedly Ever After: A Baba Yaga Novella

by Deborah Blake

  Dennis and Sam exchanged glances. There weren’t any residences in that quadrant, and the ranger station was too far away to be seen from the tower.

  Sam held out his hand for the glasses. “Let me take a look so I can see what you’re talking about,” he said, expecting something like a large, vaguely house-shaped boulder. Instead, once he’d adjusted the binoculars, he spotted the structure Peter was referring to—except that it wasn’t a house, exactly, more like a modern gypsy caravan on wheels, parked in a clearing in the forest.

  “Huh,” he said. “Just somebody camping, I guess.” Or someone who had wandered into the woods and gotten lost. That happened occasionally too. Out of habit, he swung the glasses around to check out the surrounding area, and felt his hands grow clammy at the sight of a column of gray and white smoke, shooting up less than a mile from where the caravan stood.

  Dragging a harsh breath in through scarred lungs, he turned to Dennis and said quietly, “You need to take the boys down now. Right now.”

  Dennis’s eyes widened but he didn’t ask any questions, just called the scouts and the two moms together, had them say a quick thank-you to Sam, and hustled them out the door and down the stairs. As soon as the last pair of sneakers was on the top step, Sam ran over to the two-way radio.

  “Dispatch, come in,” he said. “It’s Sam. I’ve got a smoke.” He quickly relayed the coordinates, as well as the information that there might be a civilian in harm’s way.

  The dispatcher called it in, sending the first response team on their way, then switched back to Sam and asked a few more questions about what he’d seen.

  “So, this caravan you spotted,” the dispatcher said. “Did you see anyone near it?”

  “Nope,” Sam said. “Whoever it was could have been inside, or out hiking.” Or just maybe, setting a fire.

  They’d had too many fires already this season . . . some caused by a series of fluke lightning storms, but there had a been a couple that no one had been able to explain. No sign of campers being careless with their campfires, or any indication that some moron with a cigarette had decided to go for a walk in the woods. Just fires, when there shouldn’t have been any. They’d been lucky so far and Sam had spotted them all while they were still easily controlled. But sooner or later, they were going to run out of luck.

  In Sam’s experience, you always did.

  Chapter Two

  Bella Young sat on the flip-down steps of her traveling caravan and stretched her long legs out in front of her as she looked at the surrounding forest with satisfaction. After being stuck in the dry mountains of Montana battling wildfires for weeks, mingling with local firefighters, she was happy to be back among the peaceful environment of the trees, listening to squirrels and blue jays squabble instead of people.

  It wasn’t that Bella didn’t like people, exactly. She just liked trees and animals and mountains better.

  In a way, that made her the most traditional of the three Baba Yagas who watched over the United States. After all, the original Baba Yagas, powerful witches tasked with guarding the doorways to the Otherworld, keeping the balance of nature, and occasionally—if absolutely forced into it—helping out some worthy seeker, had lived in the deep, dark forests of Russia and its Slavic neighbors.

  These days, Bella’s sister Babas Barbara and Beka mostly handled the eastern and western sides of the country, leaving Bella happily stuck in the less-populated middle. That was just fine, since she and people, well . . . let’s just say there were issues. Big, big issues.

  The Black Mountain forests, on the other hand, suited her to a tee. She hoped that whatever urge had brought her here was due more to wanderlust and less to some mysterious magical crisis. She was due for some rest and relaxation. Or at the very least, less things blowing up.

  She took a deep breath, reveling in the sharp, resinous tang of pine needles and the deep musty aroma of decaying leaves. Compared to the auto fumes of the city, they smelled better to her than the most expensive perfume.

  “Isn’t that the best smell in the world, Koshka?” she said to her companion, who currently bore the guise of a gigantic Norwegian Forest cat (since it was difficult to either fit or hide a large brown and gray dragon in a small caravan).

  All Baba Yagas traveled with their own Chudo-Yudo, although each dragon chose a different form. And pretty much anything else they wanted. Even the powerful High Queen of the Otherworld rarely argued with a dragon.

  Bella called hers Koshka, which was Russian for a female cat. It was something of an inside joke, since he was neither female nor a cat . . . nor Russian, if you came right down to it. Bella’s mentor Baba, who had found her as a child and trained her for the job, might have been from the mother country, but dragons came straight from the Otherworld.

  “It’s not bad,” Koshka replied, showing off an impressive set of incisors in a wide yawn. “I prefer the aroma of tuna, myself.” He looked back through the open door towards the compact kitchen space inside, in case Bella had somehow missed his point.

  Bella rolled her eyes. “Seriously. Smell that; it’s practically ambrosia.”

  Koshka dutifully lifted his dark pink nose into the air, the wide ruff around his neck and tufts of fur in his ears making him look a bit like his wilder cousin, the lynx. “Huh,” he said.

  “What? You don’t like pine all of a sudden?” Bella shoved herself up off the steps so she could go open a can of tuna.

  “No, I don’t like the odor of smoke in the middle of a forest,” he said. “Can’t you smell it?” He pointed his entire massive forty-pound body towards the west. “I don’t know why they bother to put those puny noses in the middle of Human faces. They’re not good for anything.”

  Bella lifted her head and sniffed deeply, but still couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. But she didn’t doubt Koshka for a minute. “Let’s go check it out,” she said, and they set off on a fast lope through the trees.

  ***

  Less than a mile from her caravan, they came upon the source of the smoke; she clearly would have scented it soon enough, even with her puny Human nose, since there was a bonfire the size of a Buick burning away merrily amid a pile of leaves and downed tree limbs. Bella looked around for any signs of whoever started it, but the area was empty except for her and her faithful dragon-cat.

  “Shit. Fire again,” she said with feeling. Bella had a love/hate relationship with fire. It was the element she was strongest in, just as Barbara was most attuned with earth and Beka with water. But in her experience, that made for as many problems as it did solutions. Still, there was clearly no one around to wrestle with this particular fire but her, so there was no point in wasting time.

  “Want some help?” Koshka asked. As a dragon, he wasn’t even mildly intimidated by fire. If he was in his natural form, he probably could have just sat on it. As a dragon, he was bigger than a Buick too. Much bigger. But it wasn’t a good idea for him to change where anyone could possibly see him, and it was broad daylight in a public forest.

  Bella gritted her teeth. “I’ve got it,” she said. After all, if there was one thing she had experience with, it was putting out fires. Unfortunately, she was also usually the one who started them, but it made for good practice for situations like this.

  She held her hands up to the sky, gathering her power until it made her fingertips tingle and her long curly red hair crackle like the flames it resembled. Then she lowered her hands until they were aimed at the fire, making a circling motion. The energy flowed smoothly out to surround the burning tinder, encompassing it in a bubble of magic. Then she snapped her fingers, and all the oxygen within that bubble disappeared. A few minutes later, the fire had died back to a few barely smoldering embers, and she snapped her fingers again to return the air to normal.

  “I love that trick,” Koshka said, walking over to sniff at the edges of the burned area. “Pah!” He yanked h
is nose away in a hurry, stalking off with his tail held high. “That stinks.”

  Bella glanced back over her shoulder as she followed him, moving faster as she heard the sound of incoming men and machinery. Someone must have spotted the smoke from the fire and reported it. Which was good, but she didn’t want to be seen lurking around the area of a suspicious fire. Her cover as a traveling artist was good, but there was no sense in subjecting it to unnecessary scrutiny if she didn’t have to.

  “What stinks?” she asked, moving faster. “The fire?”

  “No,” the dragon said. “Whatever was used to start it.”

  “Oh,” Bella said. She’d been hoping it was just a fluke of nature. There hadn’t been a storm for days, but sometimes a lightning strike could smolder for a while before bursting into flame. “That’s bad news.”

  “It gets worse,” he said, growling under his breath as he waited for her to catch up to his bounding pace. “Whatever it was, it had the faint scent of magic on it.”

  “Shit,” Bella said.

  “With a side of crap,” Koshka agreed. “Now, what about that tuna?”

  Deborah Blake is the author of Veiled Magic and the Baba Yaga novels, including Wickedly Wonderful and Wickedly Dangerous. She has published numerous books on modern witchcraft with Llewellyn Worldwide and has an ongoing column in Witches & Pagans magazine. When not writing, Deborah runs The Artisans’ Guild, a cooperative shop she founded with a friend in 1999, and also works as a jewelry maker, tarot reader, and energy healer. She lives in a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural upstate New York with five cats who supervise all her activities, both magical and mundane. Visit her online at deborahblakeauthor.com and deborahblake.blogspot.com.

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