The Riders all looked at each other.
“I ran into a bank of unnatural fog,” Gregori said, fingering his empty glass but not refilling it. “It was endless, and the bike’s headlights just got swallowed up in it. I felt like I was riding forever and getting nowhere. Creepy as hell. And there were creatures in that fog that didn’t belong here; things with fangs and claws and a foul stench that saturated the mist until I could barely breathe. It was almost a relief when the storm blew up and dropped that damned oak tree on me.” He shuddered, and refilled his glass, throwing the contents back with a compulsive swallow.
“I had creatures too,” Mikhail said. “But mine were some kind of small chittering thing, like demented squirrels on a bad acid trip. They chased me down back roads until I was completely turned around; there were so many of them, it was as if the ground behind me had fur and teeth.” He held up one leg to show them what looked like a series of tiny bite marks in the white leather pants he wore. One white boot had a chunk missing from the sole. “Thank the gods for thick leather, that’s all I can say. They disappeared when the storm came up, but then the road washed out in front of me like someone erased it, and I had to backtrack the long way.” He crunched a pickle between strong, white molars. “Freaky.”
Alexei growled. “That is nothing,” he said, tension making his accent so thick it sounded like Dat iz nuh-tink. “I was riding along, minding my own business, and a stream tried to swallow me up.” Another shot of vodka slid down his throat. Baba had lost track of whether it was number four or five. Of course, he was as big as any two normal men, so he probably didn’t even feel them yet.
Chudo-Yudo raised one furry eyebrow, and eyed the nearly empty bottle suspiciously. Clearly, he was wondering how much of the Riders’ strange tale was real, and how much was the natural Russian penchant for exaggeration while drinking. Baba was wondering the same thing, and said so.
“I’m not making this up,” Alexei said, his long mustache turned down in grim assertion. He reached into one pocket and pulled out a small green frog, who blinked wetly at the assembled company, almost lost in the giant’s large outstretched palm. “I was riding down the road next to a small creek, and the next thing I know, this huge wave of water washes downstream in a rush, overflows the banks, and engulfs the exact spot where I happened to be.”
Baba gaped at him. “What did you do?”
He shrugged, making the entire couch shake. Mikhail held his glass out away from him so as not to spill a drop of the precious liquid inside.
“I held my breath, prayed to all the gods I could think of, and kept going. But I can tell you, if I didn’t have a magical motorcycle that still thinks it is a horse, I would be lying by the side of the road, lungs filled with water and a pissed-off expression on my cold, dead face.” He took a long pull straight off the bottle. “There is something very wrong here, Baba. I swear, that river water had arms in it. I could feel them, cold and hard and clammy, trying to drag me under.”
Baba decided to have another sip of her vodka after all. The stories they’d told sent little mice of doom scampering up and down her spine.
“Maya has to be behind all of this. There’s no other explanation. But I can’t believe she’s that strong a witch and I didn’t feel it.” She could kick herself for not just grabbing Maya when she was standing right next to her. It could have prevented all this mayhem. Of course, then they would have had to try to force the location of the missing children out of her, and something told Baba that wouldn’t be easy. Damn it.
“I don’t think so, Baba,” Gregori said in his calm voice. “This could not have been the work of just one woman. No matter how powerful she is, she can’t have been in three places at once.”
“Plus throwing up one hell of a storm,” Chudo-Yudo added.
“It’s more than that,” Mikhail said, looking up from the depths of his glass. “If those creatures I ran into are from around here, I’ll wear black for a month. We’re clearly dealing with in incursion from the Otherworld.”
Alexei nodded in agreement, the braid at the end of his beard nearly sliding into his vodka. “Yeah, I’d say mine was something from the Otherworld too. Some water elemental, maybe.”
Baba’s jaw dropped open. “That’s impossible. There’s only one way to get from there to here, and there is no way anything came through it without my knowing!”
Four people and one dog turned to look accusingly at the closet. It looked back, rattling its wonky knob as if to say, “Not me, folks.”