“What was that big sigh for?” he asked, giving up on his coffee and putting it down on the counter with a thud. “We already have two of the three impossible tasks done and we’ve got more than a week left. I would think you’d be a little happier.”
Barbara rolled her eyes at him. “I’m a Baba Yaga. I do two impossible things before breakfast most days. Besides, those were the easy ones compared to the one we’ve got left. I don’t even know where to start on that.”
Bella gave her a sympathetic look.
“Oh, come on,” Liam said. “All we have to do is find a Human whose heart is so pure that he or she has never spoken a lie. How hard could that be?”
Barbara almost choked on her toast. After spitting crumbs out, she managed to say, “Are you kidding?” When Liam still looked baffled, Barbara said, “Honey, you are one of the most honest people I know. Are you going to tell me you have never told a lie?”
He opened his mouth and she added, “Never lied on a tax return? Never called into work sick when you really just wanted to go fishing?” When Liam shook his head, Barbara went on. “Never told a woman she looked pretty when she didn’t? Never told your parents a tiny fib as a child?”
Liam’s face fell as he suddenly comprehended the magnitude of their task. “But everyone does that. What kid doesn’t tell a fib or two? Who doesn’t tell a white lie to be polite or spare someone’s feelings?”
“That’s my point,” Barbara said. “Good intentions or bad, Humans lie. Most of them on a daily basis.”
“Oh,” he said, sounding glum. But then he perked up. “But wait, you’ve told me more than once that Baba Yagas don’t lie. And you may be a witch with amazing powers, but you’re technically still Human, right?”
“Mostly Human, yes. But what I said was that Baba Yagas try not to tell lies. We’re all too aware of the power of words, so we try to use ours carefully. Most of the time we’ll avoid giving a straight answer or say something that distracts from the actual question. Heck, I’ve been known to set things on fire just to divert someone from a question I couldn’t answer.”
She chuckled at a memory he was probably better off not knowing about and winked at Bella, who was known both for putting out fires and accidentally starting them when she got upset.
“So you haven’t told a lie!” Liam said, pointing at her triumphantly.
“Of course I have, you goose,” Barbara said. “Unfortunately, there are times in every Baba’s career when it is simply unavoidable. Besides which, I realize that it was a very long time ago and a little bit hard to imagine, but I too was once a child. I distinctly remember an incident in which I spilled the porridge on the fire and told my mentor Baba that Chudo-Yudo had done it.”
“She made me go outside and sit in the mud,” Chudo-Yudo said, his voice muffled by a large bone that was more inside his mouth than out. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten about that.”
“Oh,” Liam said, his shoulders slumping. “If even Baba Yagas lie when they are children, how on earth are we going to find someone Human who has never told even one tiny little fib?” He picked up his mug again, forgetting about the odd taste, and then made a face but drank it anyway.
Barbara patted his arm. “It seems impossible, I know. All the best impossible tasks do. It’s kind of in the definition. But we’ve still got some time. We’ll just have to travel around and see if we can stumble across someone really, really honest before the two weeks are up.”
“What if we take a baby?” Chudo-Yudo asked. “If the kid can’t talk yet, he or she won’t have told a lie, right?”
“NO,” Barbara and Liam said in unison. That was how they had met in the first place, because a creature called a Rusalka had broken the rule about stealing Human children and taking them through to the Otherworld lands. In fact, that was how they’d gotten Babs, since the Rusalka had killed her parents and taken their baby to be a bribe for Liam’s grief-crazed former wife to raise as her own.
“Somehow I don’t think the Queen would consider a baby as an acceptable answer,” Bella said. “And my guess is that she doesn’t deal well with cheaters.”
Barbara shuddered. “Definitely not something we want to test.”
But then Bella got a funny look on her face. “A baby,” she said. “Huh.”
“Hey, I thought we agreed on this,” Liam’s voice was tinged with alarm. “Barbara, we are definitely not stealing anyone’s baby.”
“What?” She waved a distracted hand at him. “No, of course not. Don’t be silly. Babies are noisy and they poop a lot. The Airstream would hate it.” She narrowed her eyes as her sister Baba. “What is it? Come on, I can tell you’ve thought of something.”
Bella leaned both elbows on the counter and stared at Babs. “Hey, Babs, can you answer a question for me?”