Page 3 of The Salt-Black Tree
Dark shapes, gleaming slightly, clustered a fair ways from Ranger; behind them, the driveway warped like the glimmer over hot pavement on a blinding summer day. Nat’s breath frozeagain, thin ice falling down the front of her peacoat; she stared, almost unable to believe her own eyes for the hundredth—or thousandth—time since walking into the Morrer-Pessel Tower to negotiate for her mother’s life.
She will eat you, Drozdova. After you bring her what she wants, so she can bargain with Baba Yaga to allow the theft of a native-born child.
She wanted to call what the metal horse had said a lie. She wanted to call all of this a hallucination, a cruel practical joke, a forgiving insanity.
Anything other than truth.
The shadowy things tumbled over each other, sharp cheesecloth-veils of utter negation swallowing even the faint ambient glow of winter night in the Dakotas. A few more tiny white spatters of snow drifted down, and Nat was suddenly very sure an iron-haired woman was bending over a glossy desk top high in a Manhattan skyscraper’s penthouse, her red-painted mouth pursed as her coal-hot gaze somehow pierced the intervening distance and came to rest upon a girl she calledgranddaughter.
So Baba was watching. The image was so clear, so crisp, Nat could take no refuge in tattered, comfortable disbelief.
“Get in thecar,” Dima snarled. There was a sharp report and a brilliant flash. One of the muffled, razor-edged shapes imploded; Nat could swear she saw the bullet as it streaked free, an improbable gleam.
Silver. Well, that doesn’t surprise me.
Nat clambered into the car; its hood ornament, a beast caught somewhere between snarling wolf and slump-shouldered bear, glittered angrily. She slammed the door, her teeth chattering afresh even though whatever he’d given her to drink still burned behind her breastbone and the vivid bright warmth of divinity poured strength through her, a steady reassuring glow.
Did her mother feel a corresponding weakness each time that flood filled her daughter’s body? Did it hurt?
More flashes, and faraway popping noises. Nat twisted and craned, trying to look out every window at once; the driver’s door opened and Dmitri dropped into his seat. He didn’t bother reaching for his seatbelt, just twisted the wheel-yoke and popped the brake; the black car jolted and shot forward, but not along the driveway.
He steered them for the far side of Ranger’s house, and Nat found her lips moving silently.
Of all the useless things to do, she waspraying.
LARGELY IMAGINARY
It was a far smoother ride than the motorcycle-horse. Faint vibrations poured through the black car’s body; Dmitri’s pupils held drifting red sparks and his lips skinned back from sharp pearly teeth as trees flickered by on either side and the wheels bounced. There was a snap and a crunch; barbwire snaked aside, sliced cleanly as if snipped by bolt cutters. Nat got her knees onto the passenger seat and twisted, working herself around so she could stare out the back window.
Nothing there but a winter night. But still, the cold pressed against the car’s thin shell, prying and poking.
“Sit down,” Dima snapped. “Put seatbelt on,devotchka.”
You first.Nat stayed where she was, her mouth dry and heart pounding so hard static filled her head. Her palms were slightly damp too, and a prickle of moisture along her lower back was proof that divinities could indeed sweat under stress. “What th-th-thehell…”
“Those who eat.” His hands white-knuckled on the racing yoke—of course his vehicle wouldn’t have a proper wheel, that would be entirely too prosaic for him—the gangster stared into the darkness. Nat snapped a glance over her shoulder, out the windshield, hoping to see something familiar or sane, but the headlights had turned from bright scorch-white to a low filthy yellow glow.
Like muffled lanterns, she thought, robbing pursuers of an easy target.
“You said they didn’t…” She grabbed at the seat-back as the car made a straining, fishlike turn; it lifted over a hidden gully, skimming gently on pure air, and nausea bit at her stomach because it was just like being in Koschei the sorcerer’s flying van.
“No trouble to full-grown,zaika,but they scavengers.” For once Dmitri didn’t light a cigarette; his eyes narrowed. “And you not done baking yet.”
Great. That’s just great.Nat clung to the seat’s back, awkward and ridiculous, staring wildly out the rear window as if she could somehow stave off approaching doom just by watching it. “When were you going to tell me they were so close?”
“Oh, you worried? I told you, Dima keep you nice and safe. Egg under little hen.” His teeth gleamed afresh, his profile sharp as the motorcycle-horse’s while it tore, bucking and twisting, across open country. The engine’s humming dropped into a deeper register, and though it was impossible, they seemed to be going even faster. “Sitdown. And tell me where we go.”
Where are we going? Sure. Yeah.But she already knew, Nat realized. Maybe she only had to be scared out of her wits before the signal came through clearly, or maybe she’d seen it in the Well’s shimmery depths.
Along with her own birth. What had happened afterward was a nightmare, and she didn’t want to think about it.
She managed to struggle free of her backpack without hitting him in the shoulderorhead, and finally, breathing heavily, she collapsed in the now-familiar passenger seat, tremors pouring through her. Her shoulders, her knees, her bones, her very veins still remembered the horse’s gallop.
She suspected they would for a long, long while. Maybe even the rest of her life.
How long would that be?
She will eat you, Drozdova. After you bring her what she wants.
