Wickedly Wonderful(49)
She giggled again. “Will I be seeing you again soon? That last restaurant you took me to was so fancy.” She sighed in memory.
“You can be sure you will, darlin’,” Kesh said. And you can also be sure that you will be the first one I send to work on the casino boats after I raze this dump to the ground. “You have no idea how much I am looking forward to it.”
* * *
FINALLY, IT WAS Sunday, and that meant the Wily Serpent wouldn’t be going out. She’d told Kesh last night that she needed the day to herself to do some magical work, and he’d agreed, however reluctantly, to give her some space.
So first thing after the breakfast of toast and tea that was all her twitchy stomach seemed willing to tolerate these days, she’d pulled out a bunch of arcane supplies, the bits and pieces she needed to work with the powers of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, and a dozen tiny glass dishes filled with the various samples she’d collected over the last week. Chewie sat off to the side to “supervise” (she’d made him stay at least three feet away from her during complicated magical workings ever since the time he sneezed and melted the enchanted necklace she’d been making as a wedding gift for Barbara).
Most of the magic that a Baba Yaga did was instantaneous and relatively effortless; the snap of her fingers could summon a book from across the room or turn a cloudy day into instant rain. But she was trying to achieve something much more delicate, examining the essence of each frond of seaweed or fish’s fin, so she’d decided to go the more traditional route of casting a ritual circle to contain and focus her power and whatever showed up during her explorations.
It would have been easier to have done the work outside, in a larger space, but Beka wasn’t in the mood to drag everything out to someplace private and then do even more magic to ensure that some tourist didn’t stumble upon her and get the surprise of his or her life. (The windows of the bus were already enchanted so that no one could see in; a hand-me-down from her mentor Brenna.)
So she just made do with the patch of clear floor in front of the sofa, sprinkling sea salt around herself and her supplies to create a ritual circle. Once that was in place, she sealed it with a drop of her blood by using one of her sharpest knives to prick her thumb, letting the salt in her own fluids join the beginning and the end of the white crystals.
A humming in her bones, too low to hear, told her that the circle was in place. That meant it was safe to call in the elementals: the swirling red-hot salamander that represented Fire, the mythical golden Bird of Paradise who represented Air, the tiny goat-legged faun who represented Earth, and a delicate sea horse swimming in its own bubble of seawater that stood for Water.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, bowing slightly to the elementals. “You are welcome here.”
All the small creatures bowed back from their places at the quarters: Air in the east, Water in the west, Fire in the south, and Earth in the north.
Beka gestured at the bowls that contained the selections of damaged and mutated sea life. “Can you tell me what caused this?” she asked.
Each elemental took a turn hovering above the collection of glass bowls, sending that same subliminal humming sensation through Beka’s bones. Finally, the salamander said in a fierce sizzling voice, almost too high-pitched to hear, “It comes from the sun, the great cauldron.”
The faun said hesitantly, in tones that rang clear like bells in a forest clearing, “It comes from deep under the earth, Baba Yaga, from the great untapped veins below.”
The Water and Air elementals just shook their heads.
Beka forced herself to smile and thank the elementals for their aid, giving them the tiny gifts she had gathered for them—bits of shiny crystal for the faun, a perfect miniature shell for the sea horse, a small candle for the salamander, and for the Bird of Paradise, a vial of air from the moment when the first rays of light hit the ocean, one of its favorite meals.
She had no idea what their words meant, but at least they’d tried.
As the elementals examined their gifts, Beka placed some of her samples into the black marble mortar and pestle she had inherited from Brenna. It was a bit of an “in joke” for the Baba Yagas, of course, since the earlier Babas in Russia and the surrounding Slavic countries actually rode around in enchanted mortars that were steered by huge pestles, but it was also a handy tool for magical work.
The marble was beautiful—dark porous stone with white swirls like clouds in a midnight sky—but it was also charmed so that whatever was ground within it would meld together in new and powerful ways. Beka was hoping that if she combined some of the pieces she had brought up on her dives, they would tell her something together that she hadn’t been able to discern from the individual bits on their own.