Yaga's Blood (Root and Myth Book 1) Read online

  “What?”

  “A firecracker. That was your Mom’s nickname then. It’s like you didn’t have a father. You’re all her.”

  He smiled lopsidedly.

  “I’m taller,” Mira mumbled grouchily. “And I can actually sing. And actually have a sense of direction, unlike her.”

  That gained her another bark of his laughter.

  “I forgot the whole getting lost in her own house thing. And the horrible singing...” His eyes grew distant for a moment, but then he visibly jerked out of the memories. “Your Mother was sixteen, and yes, she was sort of an heiress. Yadviga was grooming her after herself. Best possible education, tutors, lots of magical classes in addition to the best private school. Exchange programs in London and Marcel. Constant dieting, expensive shoes. Yarina hated it. And—”

  His face distorted in a grimace. It was dark, but Mira thought she could still read shame and pain written on his face.

  “I seduced her. I seduced her mind. Used her to break me out of my cage. She was sixteen, and naive, and lonely, and— I convinced her I was her Destined, and she agreed to help me.”

  “What does it mean, ‘destined?’” Mira whispered.

  “I reckon your Mom never taught you, but Russian girls are very fond of fortune-telling.” He was now as much as snarling. “During the twelve days between the Orthodox Christmas and the Baptism of Christ, with the proper use of a simple mirror and a candle, a girl can ask to see her Destined, her future husband.”

  He was silent for a few seconds, and Mira didn’t dare to move hoping he’d continue.

  “Your mother is an infuriating woman, Mira. The most stubborn, stroppy, impossible woman I’ve met. The husband for her was chosen the day she was conceived. From another old family. Another folklore character, of course. Have you heard of Zmei Gorynych?” He spoke on without waiting for her answer, “Splendid chap. Has the ability to turn into a giant basilisk at will. But your Mom decided she’d look. She wanted to know who would be a better match for her. The problem with opening a channel into the depth of the ancient magic, is that someone might hijack it.”

  “I’d been in that cage for almost two centuries by then. You start to lose perspective there, you know.” His smirk was almost like an animal baring its teeth now. “I knew she had very little chance to survive it, but I sweet talked, and listened to her little problems, and discussed the books she read - and convinced her we would be together when I was out, and that I would take her far, far away from her parents. She lit up the candle every night, and it took a while, but eventually she agreed. And she helped me. She didn’t die, but she used up all her magic. She couldn’t even light a candle without matches, she had so little.”

  “And what happened next?” Mira asked, because he was now driving silently.

  “I became… me. A person with lashings of magic, but still a person. And I ran. I left her behind.”

  Mira saw him swallow with difficulty, his throat bobbed.

  “Your Mother was mortal now, so they just… forgot about her. Let her be, stuffed her into the back rooms of their giant mansion in St. Petersburg. And then I heard she ran away from them after all. After university, she went on a trip to Canada, and never came back. Since she was of no use, I assume they never looked for her.”

  “And how come Ms. Klaassen was supposed to call you in case of emergency?” Mira asked in disbelief.

  “Your mother wrote me a letter a couple of years ago. Told me nothing about her current circumstances, just asked me to fly to Canada if the power were to somehow get inherited by Yadviga. As you can imagine, I did feel a wee bit indebted to her,” he scoffed disdainfully. “She was very gracious about it. Didn’t bring up the whole ruining her life thing. Just begged for help, as an old friend.”

  “But why you?” Mira pressed on, and he threw her an odd look from the corner of his eyes.

  “There are very few who’d go against Yadviga. I had had… altercations with your grandmother in the past. Your mother has always been very good at knowing whom to trust, as well. It was one of her many gifts. She knew I’d agree.”

  Mira gave it a thought. There was another question that was worrying her.

  “But now… Now that it turns out that I have powers, what will they do to her if they find her?”

  “She’s in the way.” Bessemer gave her a pointed dark look. “I doubt she’d let them anywhere near you if she could prevent it.”

  “But they are my relatives. I mean, she’s Yadviga’s daughter. Are they actually going to—”

  “Kill her?” he asked in an unnaturally light tone, and Mira shied away from him. “Yes, Mira. If she tries to keep them away from you, they will kill her. And knowing Yadviga - and we are old time mates, so you can trust my judgement - after she’s done with you, you’ll embrace your role wholeheartedly.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I would never agree to go with her! Especially if she hurt my Mom!”

  Mira suddenly felt furious. And for some reason, most of her anger was focused on Bessemer. He was smirking and expressing with all his body that she just didn’t know what she was talking about, and that she would surely let some crazy Russian relatives brainwash her!

  They both were silent now. Mira was fuming and coming up with more and more sassy comebacks in her head as Bessemer was driving.

  Mira didn’t get a chance to resume their conversation, since Lisa shifted in the backseat with a groan, and then sat up.

  “I’m hungry.” The doll had a low breaking voice, and Mira slowly turned and looked at it. A pair of bright blue eyes met hers, and Lisa smiled widely. “Hi.”

  “Hi back,” Mira muttered.

  “Can we eat now?” the doll asked insistently.

  “What was the name of the café?” Bessemer suddenly asked, and Mira tore her eyes off the doll.

  “What café?”

  “Where your mother saw a photo of a hot guy.” Bessemer’s sarcastic voice lacked the usual bite. He was clearly crushing.

  “Ulf’s Fearing. Do you want me to google the address?” Mira asked, and he threw his cell onto her lap.

  “Use mine.”

  Mira swiped the screen, and soon they were slowly driving towards the tea house.

  ***

  They parked in front of Ulf’s Faering, and all three of them stared at the dark windows. Mira checked the phone, it was around quarter past three.

  “What are we going to do now? I mean, we don’t know if that wolf guy is even there, and if he will help us—” she asked Bessemer.

  He leaned back in his seat and rubbed his face with his hands with a groan.

  “Even if he’s there, I don’t have enough mojo to talk him into helping us.”

  “So, you did use it on Mike the Bearman?”

  Mira was still struggling with understanding where the magic stopped and the mortal stuff started. And she was starting to suspect that, maybe, there was no separating the two.

  “It’s just… that’s what I do, what I am.” There was some funny insecurity in his voice. “I suppress other’s will.”

  “He’s basically an Alpha in a pack,” Lisa suddenly chimed in from the back seat, and Mira jumped up slightly. She was still freaked out by the former doll.

  “Don’t you feel magic coming off him?” Lisa said. “He’s all about wealth, and power, and dominance. You know, the whole ‘can’t be killed that easily’ and ‘tsar Koschei’ thing. But not now, heh?”

  “Shut up, cloth head,” Bessemer sneered in a low voice, and the doll suddenly burst into merry laughter.

  “Cloth head! Ha-ha-ha! Good one! Because I was made of cloth before, right? Get it?”

  Lisa poked Mira’s shoulder, inviting her to share in the joke, and more snorts and snickers followed. Apparently, the doll didn’t take the mockery personally. And then the laughter stopped abruptly.

  “I’m hungry. Can we eat something?”

  “Can we find some other shelter?” Mira asked Bessemer, and he sighed. />
  “We could go to a hotel. The talking rug here is still in the middle of its first night. It’s when a magical being is at its strongest. In the morning it’ll go back to being a doll, and after that you’ll have to teach it, and—”

  “I don’t like it,” Lisa interrupted, and Mira saw that the doll was now glaring at the man. “I don’t like to be called ‘it.’”

  “What do you want to be called?” Mira asked, and Bessemer rolled his eyes.

  “Can we discuss staying alive tonight first?” he asked. “Surely, the self-actualisation of a former handmade toy could hardly be a priority here,” he drew out, only to be interrupted by ‘Lisa.’

  “I want to be called Vasya. Isn’t it what your mother called me?” the newly named Vasya asked Mira. “Vassilissa. Like the legendary warrior.”

  “Vasya is a boy’s name,” Bessemer noted, and the doll turned to him, with confusion on its pale face.

  “What does it have to do with anything?”

  “Vassilissa was a woman, while Vasya is a boy’s name. So, you need to decide whether you’re male, or female, because we will need to know how to address you.” Bessemer looked as if he couldn’t believe he’d allowed to be dragged into this discussion. “Since you don’t like ‘it,’ choose between ‘he’ and ‘she.’”

  Vasya opened their mouth, but Bessemer barked first, “But not now! Because now we need to find a place to hide.”

  “And eat,” Vasya added under their breath, and Bessemer emitted a sound very close to a growl.

  “Technically, we can use ‘they.’ They don’t actually have to choose between being a boy or a girl. They can be non-binary, and it’s grammatically acceptable now,” Mira started, and Bessemer slammed his hand into the wheel.

  “Enough! Their majesty Vasya at the moment is the best protection we have, so we’re going to a hotel. And we are deciding in the morning what to do.”

  Vasya made a small noise, and Bessemer whipped his head and threw the doll a death glare, “And yes, we will bloody eat first!”

  It took them almost an hour of calling hotels and motels to find a spot, but finally they were driving through the sleeping town of Gimli to a small motel that could offer them two rooms.

  ***

  Thankfully, the motel had guest parking, so Bessemer just left the two of them in the truck, fished a fresh set of clothes out of a sports bag he had stuffed under the backseat, and quickly changed outside.

  Mira sat straight in her seat, waiting for him to return, when Vasya spoke up, “I’m kinda worried I don’t know what to do. How to protect you. My head feels… empty.”

  Mira looked at the doll’s reflection in the mirror.

  “You’re doing fine,” Mira tried to reassure the doll. “I mean, you know something, like about Koschei’s magic. And you saved me from the shishiga on the highway.”

  “It’s hard to be a person,” Vasya pronounced in a sad tone and shifted on the seat. “I don’t remember what it’s like to be a doll, because I didn’t live then. But I remember seeing your life, and being with you everywhere… How do you manage it?”

  “My Mom always says, ‘one deep inhale and one long exhale at a time,’” Mira answered in a small voice.

  She really didn’t feel like she could give any advice on being a functional human being these days. Vasya emitted a long mournful sigh.

  “I have some knowledge about magic. I think it’s from what your Mom put into me. And I know the simple rules, like you can’t be naked among people, and you need to use a spoon when eating, but it’s not all, right? I mean, being a person isn’t all about behaving nicely?”

  Vasya caught Mira’s eyes in the mirror again, and the girl shook her head. The driver’s door flew open, and Bessemer stuck his head in.

  “I’m going to get our keys. Try to make our cloth friend presentable here. And I need your cash. It leaves no trail,” he grumbled.

  Mira sighed and opened her backpack. Bessemer took the envelope and slammed the door closed.

  ***

  The motel looked like any motel in a show about people travelling through North America, potentially fighting monsters. But in Mira’s case, monsters were her roommates.

  Vasya bounced inside, still wrapped in Bessemer’s coat, with Mira’s underwear and a t-shirt underneath. The doll had changed in the car, while Mira kept her eyes closed. Mira started entering the room after Vasya, when she noticed that the man didn’t cross the threshold. Mira wondered whether he was supposed to be invited, like a vampire.

  “I need to be cleansed,” Bessemer spoke, dropping his sports bag onto the floor. “The shishiga had some of my blood, it’s on my trail. I can bring the darkness into a dwelling.”

  “OK,” Mira drew out, waiting for him to continue.

  “Get a bucket, or some jug, and fill it with water. We will need knives, and the rowan berries, and the mugwort.”

  “Knives?” Mira asked in a choked voice.

  He had mentioned human sacrifices before.

  “Can we eat now?” Vasya asked from inside.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Bessemer sneered.

  Mira peeked behind her. Vasya was jumping on the bed, Bessemer’s peacoat bobbing around its lanky body.

  “The cloth head will know what to do, actually. And chivvy on, would you?” Bessemer grumbled, leaning his back against a wall. “We need to all be in the same space, it’s safer.”

  Mira suspected he was also in a rush, since he had obvious trouble standing. She hurried inside.

  “Vasya, we need to cleanse Mr. Bessemer. Could you, please, get down and help me?”

  Vasya stopped jumping and looked down at Mira with curiosity in its round blue eyes.

  “Who’s Mr. Bessemer?”

  Mira sighed and went to the bathroom to find some sort of a bucket. There was a small plastic one, for ice, and she filled it with water from a tap.

  Vasya appeared in the door frame, with three table knives clutched in a fist.

  “It’s best if they are silver, but at least it’s metal,” the doll muttered.

  Mira fished out the berries and the scrunched, sad-looking twigs from her pockets. The knives and the vegetation were dropped into the water. Then Vasya added salt from three little packages they found in the mini-bar.

  “You will need to say the words. It'll work better coming from a witch,” Vasya said, and they both looked into the bucket.

  The concoction looked like a child’s game - a pretend soup, maybe - and Mira had a sudden acute moment of sobriety. It was just a plastic bucket from a cheap motel and some weeds in it, and maybe, there was still a chance she’d wake up, in her bed, and it would be time to go to school, and her Mom would be making coffee in the kitchen.

  Or not.

  “What do I say?” she asked in a quiet voice.

  “Mother River, take the dark and the painful away. Sister Salt, cleanse and protect. Water runs, the evil flees,” Vasya pronounced in a reverent tone, and Mira repeated, keeping her eyes on the bucket.

  Nothing happened. She half expected the water to change colour, or emit purple smoke, or something.

  “Did it work?” she asked the doll, but once she lifted her eyes from the bucket in her hands she realized that Vasya had already left.

  The doll was now sitting on one of the two queen size beds, legs crossed, loudly crunching chips from a small bag. Mira sighed again and stepped out of the room.

  Bessemer was sitting on the dirty carpet of the motel hall, his back to the wall, eyes closed.

  “I got the water,” Mira addressed him, and he looked up at her.

  His eyes were red-rimmed and dull.

  “You need to splash it on me. The forehead, the throat, the palms, and over the heart. I’d go outside for that, but I don’t think I can get up,” he said in an apologetic tone. “Take a handful, and just splash. With each handful say, ‘Water and salt, keep malice at bay.”

  Mira inhaled and stuck her hand into the bucket. The first
batch was just a few drops that pathetically flew into his face and into the soft dark wave of hair above his forehead. She mumbled the words, feeling like an idiot. He lifted his chin, and she repeated the action with the throat.

  He then lifted his hands to her, palms open, and they cleansed first the right one, then the left one.

  “Wait, I need to get up for this,” he said and started rising with difficulty.

  Mira remembered that he hadn’t slept since they'd met, and how much blood she’d noticed on the floor under the driver’s seat.

  “On the heart now,” he said and cringed. “The shishiga probably sprayed quite a lot of venom into my bloodstream, so you should take a step back.”

  “What? That thing had venom?!” Mira exclaimed, moving away from Bessemer.

  “Not physical, more like porcha. It’s like that weak curse, a bad eye thing…” Bessemer’s speech was getting slurred. “Could we already...”

  “Yeah, yeah, sorry,” Mira mumbled and scooped a generous amount of the water.

  The liquid hit Bessemer into the center of the chest, he grunted, and then gulped air with an open mouth.

  “Water and salt, keep malice at bay,” Mira pronounced firmly.

  A visible shudder ran through Bessemer’s body. Mira heard the already familiar hiss, and the snakes withered at his feet. The skull she’d seen on the highway glowed through his face again, she once again saw the dead black eye sockets instead of the blue irises, and he fell on his knees.

  For a few seconds they were frozen in silence.

  “I’m good… Safe now…” he groaned, and lifted his normal, human eyes at her. “You’ll have to help me inside.”

  Mira took a step towards him.

  “Leave the bucket out here, and my bag too. And send your doll to take care of my clothes in it. They need to be cleansed and destroyed.”

  Mira picked him up under his arm and pulled up. He was heavy, and she was worried about the injured shoulder. He rose with a muffled moan, and they slowly trod into the room.

  Vasya was drinking root beer from a can and watching TV on the bed. Mira helped Bessemer into the second one. He heavily dropped on it, right over the tucked in comforter.