Alexei had been quietly counting heads. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t you have an extra kid here?” He bent down to look at them all.
Hannah stared at him coolly, clearly unimpressed by his huge size. The boy broke away from the older girl holding his hand and ran up to Alexei to tug on his braided beard, making everyone laugh. Alexei just sighed and swung the boy up onto his shoulders.
“It’s a long story,” Baba said, one hand resting on the little girl’s shoulders. They couldn’t keep calling her Hannah; it must pierce Liam to the heart every time he heard it. “This is . . . um . . .”
“Babs,” Hannah said, in her soft tenor voice, like water running over mossy rocks. “Like Baba Yaga. Only shorter, because I’m shorter.”
Baba felt something twang and strum inside her own heart; some unidentifiable magic she couldn’t put a name to nearly as easily as the girl had named herself. It was as if a piece she hadn’t even known she was missing had suddenly settled into place. She gave a brief, affectionate tug at the girl’s pixie hair.
“You’ll grow,” she said. “Now how about you help me get all these other kids back to their parents?”
*
IT WASN’T QUITE that simple, naturally. Once they’d walked back to the road, Liam had to figure out the logistics of three adults and five children. The Riders would stick to their bikes, of course, but the children couldn’t ride with them. In the end, Penelope took Petey in his car seat, as well as the older girl. Baba drove Maya’s car—since she obviously wouldn’t be needing it again—along with the newly renamed Babs and the little boy. Mary Elizabeth was proudly awarded the shotgun seat in the cruiser.
Before they set off, Baba stuck her head in the cruiser’s window and suggested to Liam that he use the radio to call Nina, and ask her to have all the children’s parents assemble at the sheriff’s department.
“Are you sure?” Liam asked her. “Don’t you remember the zoo that we walked into the last time?”
The wicked grin put in another appearance, making his pulse quicken as it always did. “I do,” she said. “And I’m thinking we might as well have as big an audience as possible for your triumphant return. We wouldn’t want anyone important to miss it now, would we?”
*
THEY DROVE SLOWLY down the back roads, in deference to the kids who didn’t have car seats, and to give Baba’s predicted welcoming committee plenty of time to arrive. Sure enough, when their bizarre convoy of three motorcycles, two cars, and a sheriff’s cruiser pulled up to the front of the building, the parking lot was full. Stepping inside the entrance, Liam felt the noise and commotion hit him like a tidal wave, threatening to knock him over with its hectic force. But he strode in with his head held high, waving casually at Nina sitting in her dispatcher’s booth.
“McClellan!” Clive Matthews rushed to cut him off before he could get any further into the room, where clots of anxious parents milled around restlessly. “You have a lot of nerve calling all these people in here. You have no authority! In case you’ve forgotten, you’ve been suspended!” His pigeon chest thrust out indignantly as he squawked at Liam.
Oh, this is going to feel wonderful. Liam and Baba stepped apart, revealing the children who’d marched in behind them, hidden by the bulk of the Riders, Penelope, and Fake Melissa, who faded back to stand against a bile-green wall.
“I thought it would be best to get these kids back to their parents as soon as possible,” Liam said calmly.
Matthews’s jaw dropped, and for what might have been the first time in his life, the board president was actually speechless. The room erupted in pandemonium, with parents racing forward to embrace their lost angels, deputies and board members beaming and clapping each other and Liam on the back with hearty abandon. In the background, Liam could hear Nina on the radio, broadcasting the news of the children’s return to anyone with a police scanner.
Eventually, things returned to something vaguely resembling order, and everyone clambered for an explanation of how Liam had rescued the children. He’d been thinking about this in the car on the drive there, and remembered one of the theories they’d tossed around before discovering that Maya was behind the entire thing.
“It turns out Peter Callahan was collecting the children to sell to a group of foreign pedophiles; powerful men in the Middle East who would pay him huge amounts of money and make useful connections for his drilling business,” Liam said with a straight face. “Thankfully, he hadn’t completed the deals yet, so the children were still waiting to be shipped out. It looks like his assistant Maya was helping him the entire time; it may even have been her idea, since it turns out that her entire life’s history was a lie.”