Baba just smiled her secretive little smile, as if she knew something he—and the enemy—didn’t. “It really isn’t fair. Even on a bad day, the Riders could wipe the floor with that bunch without even breaking a sweat. Besides, I think you mean four against dozens.” She pointed up at the sky, where a brilliant red dragon was swooping down from the shadow of the largest moon, causing a ruby-hued eclipse.
“What the hell is that?” Liam asked, as they pelted down the hillside past the gory battle being waged on their behalf. Fur and blood flew through the air, green and blue and crimson.
Baba’s eyes twinkled. “That,” she said, “is Koshei. Glorious, isn’t he?”
And then they just ran, following the glowing light on the edge of Baba’s sword, onward toward a small boy who was depending on them to find him and bring him home.
TWENTY-NINE
THE SHINING HAIR on the silver sword led them through treelined paths of emerald green and past barren shores where crusted eddies of salt were the only evidence of long-vanished seas. Even the weird and uncanny areas had their own eerie beauty, with the exception of some spots where the fabric of the land seemed warped and distorted, crumpled in on itself in sickly shades of olive gray and mottled brown mixed with a twisted licorice black.
As they sidled past a section where rocks had melted into hissing puddles of molten lava that ate away at everything in its path, Liam asked Baba, “Is this normal? I mean, as much as you can use a word like that in a land like this?”
She shook her head, dislodging a lingering cobweb, and glanced around them with a sigh. “No. Not at all. What you’re seeing is the effect of Maya’s overuse of a doorway that wasn’t supposed to exist in the first place. There is a reason that such things are closely monitored and controlled. Magic has its own rules, and when you break them, well . . . bad things happen.”
She gestured at the grim destruction around them. “This is why the queen was so adamant about finding Maya and the doorway and putting a stop to the imbalance. If it goes on long enough, it could destroy the entire Otherworld, or turn it into something even more unpredictable than it already is.”
An odd rustling noise in the underbrush made Liam jump. He glanced over his shoulder, but didn’t see anything besides straggly brown bushes that dangled with dayglow orange berries, as if someone had glued the contents of a package of Cheetos to a shrubbery. He shuddered, feeling the hairs go up on the back of his neck.
“I think something may be following us,” he said to Baba in a low voice. “Or a bunch of somethings.”
Her full lips compressed into a thin line. “Yep, they’ve been out there for a while. I don’t know if they work for Maya, or are just some curious locals trying to figure out if we’re edible.” At Liam’s startled glance, she waved her sword menacingly. “Don’t worry, they’re not likely to bother us. For some reason, the creatures of the Otherworld find me a bit threatening.” An evil smirk lit her eyes from within.
“Huh,” Liam said, not feeling at all reassured. He tightened his grip on his gun, just in case.
*
THE TRAIL LED them to a huge, crooked house like a great mansion built of enormous white boulders and roughly hewn trees, lopsided and misshapen, yet still impressive in its own way. Baba swung the sword to and fro, but it stubbornly insisted on pointing toward the shambling wreck of a dwelling.
“Well, shit,” Baba said with feeling. This was not good. Not good at all.
Liam turned to her, startled. “What’s the matter, did we lose her? Did the hair stop working?”
“Sadly, no,” Baba said, plucking the hair from the sword and tucking it back in her pouch. “Maya is definitely in there. But I know whose house this is, and she’s not going to be happy to see us.” She sheathed her sword, and gestured for Liam to put his gun back in its holster.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “The place looks pretty creepy.”
“You have no idea,” Baba said. “But I assure you, if I can’t talk our way out of this, weapons probably won’t do us any good.”
She led the way up to the massive front door, considered knocking, then shrugged and just walked in, Liam on her heels. Once inside, the entire house revealed itself to be one sprawling, filthy room, lit mainly by the reddish glow of a fire laid in a hearth big enough to roast an entire ox with space to spare. Faint additional light slipped apologetically through smudged windows, as if it knew it had no business being there.
Liam smothered a gasp as his eyes adjusted to the murky dimness, and Baba put out a reassuring hand. Not that she felt all that reassured herself.
Maya was there, all right, along with a frightened, crying boy wearing a blue Yankees cap, a yellow shirt, and denim shorts, now torn and dirty, as if he’d been dragged through mud and brambles. Behind the two of them stood a gigantic woman with one filmy eye in the middle of her forehead and a necklace of bones around her neck. The bones looked alarmingly human.