Baba closed the refrigerator reluctantly, patting its stainless steel surface as if to reassure it of her speedy return. A glance over Chudo-Yudo’s furry white shoulder made it clear that it was likely to end up an empty promise.
A long procession wound its slow dusty way up the narrow, pitted road, led by an oversized red truck on a jacked-up chassis with monstrous tires and a Union Jack painted slightly off-kilter on the side. A dozen more reasonably sized trucks in various colors followed it up the gravel highway, interspersed with a few SUVs and even one VW Bug, which bobbled along between two large vehicles like a comma in a run-on sentence. To Baba’s unhappy eyes, it looked like a rainbow of iron and steel and plastic, fueled by fury instead of refracted prisms of light.
“Oh yay,” she said with a glower. “It looks like we’re having a party. And me without my party frock on.”
“I’m thinking your battle armor might be more useful,” Chudo-Yudo remarked with his usual accuracy. “Do you want me to get you a sword?”
Baba was seriously tempted. She’d love to see the faces of these yokels if she barreled out of the Airstream, clad in gleaming silver armor and waving a huge scimitar over her head. One ululating battle cry and they’d all be peeing their pants as they ran screaming back down the road.
Unfortunately, since she was still trying to find a way to live here, at least until the children were found, scaring the locals even further probably wasn’t her best approach.
Too bad. She loved a good battle yell.
Instead, she brushed an errant twig out of her long hair, pushed it back over her shoulders, and walked out to face her uninvited guests. A tee shirt and black leather would have to do. At least she was wearing her shit-kicking boots.
TWENTY-TWO
A MOTLEY ASSORTMENT of men assembled on her erstwhile front lawn. A few faces she recognized, more that she didn’t. What she did recognize, though, was the madness in the mob-fever that gripped them all, and the weapons they’d brought along to back it up. She saw at least three shotguns, as well as a number of baseball bats and even a few pitchforks. How traditional. All they lacked were the flaming torches; with those, it would be just like home in the tiny superstitious rural villages of Mother Russia.
As she stepped outside, with Chudo-Yudo in the doorway at her back, a roar like a wounded bear rose up to greet her. Wild and feral, mindless with fear and rage, it flowed over her with bestial power, one of the most frightening sounds in the universe.
The mob raised their arms, flailing their weapons at her, although as yet, they weren’t aimed with purpose. Individual voices rose above the crowd, yelling incoherent threats, and ugly obscenities. The high-pitched tones of the few women in the group assaulted her ears with shrill hysteria, like angry crows trying to drive a hawk away from their nests.
One man, larger and angrier than the rest, stepped forward. He was clearly the owner of the mammoth truck, wearing a tee shirt that matched the logo on his Chevy and tattoos over much of the visible parts of his body. The weak late-afternoon sun arced off of his shaved head, and a length of gleaming chain hung loosely from a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt.
“Witch!” he yelled at her, the sound of his voice reducing the others to the background murmur of waves beating on a rocky shore. “This here is your unwelcomin’ committee. We’ve had enough of your mischief around these parts, and we aim to get your ass in that fancy trailer of yours and headed down the road to anywhere but here!” The others howled in agreement, and a fist-sized rock came whizzing by her head and crashed into the Airstream behind her.
“You know,” Baba said in a conversational tone, “it’s really not polite to throw things. Especially not at my house. It tends to get quite peeved.”
The big man blinked at her, thrown off his stride by her calm demeanor. “Look, you whore,” he said loudly. “We’ll do whatever it takes for you to get the message. You’re not wanted around here. Everybody knows you’ve been messing with people’s animals and their crops, doin’ some kind of voodoo and making folks sick with that crap you’ve been sellin’.” He lifted the chain he held threateningly. “So are you goin’ to get out on your own, or are we goin’ to have to help you along? Because one way or the other, you’re leavin’.”
Baba sighed. Despite their numbers, their weapons, and their leader’s size, she wasn’t really worried about her own safety. She figured that she and Chudo-Yudo between them could take care of a mob three times this size, even without calling in the Riders, which she could do quite easily. But she didn’t want to have to hurt anyone here. Underneath the belligerence and nasty words, they were just people who had been manipulated and misled, and she’d just as soon not have to punish them for allowing their fear to be turned into anger and directed at her.