Magic Slays (Kate Daniels 5)

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."