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Witch Warrior

Steven Piziks

Steven Piziks teaches English in Michigan. His students think he's hysterical, which isn't the same as thinking he's hilarious. When not writing books and grading papers, he plays harp, wrestles with his three sons, and spends more time on-line than is probably good for him. Although he adopted two of his children from Ukraine, his story in this anthology bears no resemblance to his life whatsoever. Really. Writing as Steven Harper, he has produced the critically-acclaimed Silent Empire series. Visit his web page at http://www.sff.net/people/spiziks

 

The knock exploded through the house. I bolted out of my chair and rushed for the front door. What kind of idiot? Eva had just gone down for her afternoon nap, and waking her at this point would change her from a darling, dark-haired toddler into a howling hurricane of death. Not only that, we have a sign out front that clearly says solicitors will be hexed. this means you.

I reached for the knob, expecting to see Witnesses with Watchtowers or Latter-Day Saints with leaflets, and working myself up into a royal snit over the situation. I'm a tall guy, and rangy, with red hair, green eyes, and a fair Irish complexion. My wife Collette calls me her suburban Celtic warrior. Not quite the fearsome nickname most men want to hear from their wives. Still, I can get as ticked as the next guy when some overly-religious dickwad pounds on my door, wakes my daughter, and expects an on-the-spot conversion.

I yanked the door open and found myself staring at a big, saggy bosom.

I blinked. The bosom filled the doorway and threatened to spill over me like an avalanche of bread dough. This was a bosom that had never known the touch of elastic, and it was only a few inches from my nose. The expanse moved slowly up and down as the owner inhaled and exhaled. It slowly dawned on me that I was looking at a woman who was at least two heads taller than me. I slowly raised my eyes to her face. Old. Ancient. Paleolithic. You could have lost an SUV in the wrinkles. Moles sprouted hairs long enough to braid. Iron-gray hair scraggled in a hundred different directions, though a bejeweled golden comb was stuck in the mess as an apparent afterthought. Her lower lip hung down like a toboggan run. Two dark eyes gleamed like sharp shards of night sky. She wore a frankenstein dress made of a thousand patches, and I think her boots were soled with iron. An apron covered her waist, and a blue dish towel embroidered with little yellow fishies was tucked into the string. This wasn't the grandmother from hell. This was the grandmother from hell's second sub-basement.

"William McCrae?" she rasped in the voice of a professional cigar smoker.

I had to clear my throat twice before I could answer. "Yeah?"

"Hand over the children." She thrust out a horny hand tipped with blackened nails. I had taken down our screen door to fix it, meaning there was nothing between her and me, and she was practically thrusting her hand into the house.

"No!" Reflexively I shoved her arm aside. It was like pressing a steel bar, but she dropped it. "Who the hell do you think you are?"

"I think you know the answer to that," she croaked, then shifted her gaze to a point over my shoulder. "Ah! Here comes one of them now."

Involuntarily, I flicked a glance behind me. My twelve-year-old son Danilo was coming into the living room. In one hand he held a remote-control airplane. In the other, he held the remote. Like his sister Eva, Danilo has the dark hair, dark eyes, and stocky build typical of many Eastern Europeans. We adopted him and Eva last year from Ukraine. Eva was just entering toddlerhood at the time, but Danilo was eleven and retains clear memories of his homeland and birth family.

"Tato?" he said, using a Ukrainian word for Dad. "Who that?"

"Danny!" I said. "Get back!"

Then he caught sight of the woman at the door. The color fled his face and I swear he almost fainted. "Baba Yaga!" he squeaked. And he rushed out of the room.

A cold chill swept over me and I forced myself to turn back to the door. Of course I had known who the woman was. I had known the moment I had opened the door. But denial isn't just for alcoholics. Baba Yaga, the great Witch of Ukraine, grinned down at me with iron teeth. Her breath was warm and sour as whisky mash. The Celtic warrior and Wiccan Witch inside me nearly wet themselves, but I made myself stand in the doorway like a stack of bricks, though that was probably because I was dropping them from my rectum and they were propping me up.

"You can't have Eva or Danilo," I said, surprised at how steady my voice remained. "They're mine."

"They belong to Ukraine, Billy-boy. You and your wife took them away from their homeland without permission."

Now I was getting angry, which made the whole situation a lot easier to handle. I drew myself up. "The hell we did! Collette and I jumped through every legal hoop, sometimes twice. We got halfway through the adoption process with one agency before they found out both of us were Wiccan and freaked out, so we started over with a second agency. When we finally got Ukraine's permission to come over there, we went to the National Adoption Center in Kyiv. They told us no infants were available—so sorry, those are the breaks—but there was a toddler with an eleven-year-old brother no one wanted. They gave my wife and me permission to meet the kids. When we did, we instantly realized Danilo and Eva were meant to be our children. A week later, a judge signed the papers and gave us permission to bring them home. All. Perfectly. Legal." I sketched a Celtic rune for power in the air and whispered a small word. My knuckles glowed blue. "They're my children now, old woman."

"I didn't ask about the law," Baba Yaga said. "And your puny charm only proves my point. You didn't ask my permission, one Witch to another, to take my children out of my country."

Ah. It was just another hoop to jump through. But my pride rankled. And the old bitch had scared Danny. Still, I made myself bow and forced my tone into one of smooth respect.

"I beg your pardon," I said. "As one Witch to another, may my wife Collette and I have your kind permission to take Eva and Danilo from your country and raise them as our own?"

She adopted a thoughtful pose, running one thorny finger down her drooping lower lip. Saliva followed the tip in a snail trail.

"No," she said at last. "I'm taking them back tonight at sunset. Maybe I'll eat one on the way home as a snack, hey?"

The suburban Celtic warrior and the Wiccan Witch roared to life together. "You just try it, old woman. You'll have to cross the wards we set. And then you'll have to get past me."

She cocked her head at me. "Are you a Witch or a warrior, boy?" And she deliberately thrust one long, bony arm through the doorway into the house. Violet light flared along her forearm, and I felt the wards the entire coven had set for us pop like stale bubble gum. An instant migraine rammed my eyes three feet into my head. I cried out and clapped my hands over my face until the pain subsided.

"Can't decide, eh?" Baba Yaga rasped. "Sucks to be you. Say your good-byes, Billy-boy. At sunset, those children are mine."

With that, she stomped down the porch steps to the front lawn, where sat the biggest mortar I had ever seen. You could have ground a healthy oak into mulch with it. She clambered aboard, picked up a pestle the size of a bull walrus, and shoved herself down the street. The mortar glided like a hovercraft, but the thudding pestle left a series of potholes in the concrete. Dully I wondered if she was visible to the neighbors and what they might think if she were.

I shut the door and allowed myself a few moments of internal drama. Let's see. We had anger, fear, shakiness, a general what-the-hell-brought-this-on sensation. No denial, though. The image of that horrifying bosom was burned too deeply into my retinas for that. I gulped and panted. But thirty seconds of internal freak-out time was all I could give myself—I had to see if Danny and Eva were all right.

Eva was still asleep in her crib. I reached out to smooth her dark curls, then noticed my hand was shaking and stopped myself. I didn't want to accidentally poke her cheek and wake her up. She was two years old, and a little behind in her development—a common situation among orphanage babies. According to the court records, her father had died (causes unspecified) two months before she'd been born. Her mother never quite recovered from the birth and died the winter before Eva's first birthday. She and Danilo had lived with an aunt for a while, but the aunt had been barely able to support her own three children, let alone two more, and she had eventually sent Eva and Danilo to the state-run orphanage.

Eva shifted in her sleep. I wanted to snatch her up and hold her close. She was my daughter, no matter what Baba Bitchka said. But how the hell was I going to fight the most powerful figure in Ukrainian folklore? My mouth went dry at the thought. I was a mortal Wiccan who'd been practicing magic for over twenty years. I had exorcised ghosts and faced down the fae. Once I'd even tracked down a vampire. With help. But Baba Yaga was on another plane. Hell, she owned the airline.

I ran through options in my head. It was August, the worst possible time for something like this to happen. All women in the coven, including Collette, were on a women-only camping trip near Lake Michigan this week. All the men except me had taken advantage of the wife-free time to go on trips of their own. I could call Collette on her cell, but she and the women would never get home before sunset. Fear and worry gnawed at me, and I dealt with it by moving forward.

I found Danilo hiding under his bed.

"No," I said, halfway underneath the frame. "She is not going to take you away. I won't let her. Mama and I are Witches. Remember how we scared away the pixies in the basement? And when we got rid of the ghost in the Patterson's pantry?"

"Baba Yaga not pixie," Danny said from the corner. "She eat children."

"I have magic. I am strong." Though I wondered how strong I looked with my rear end sticking out from under a bed and clumps of dust in my hair. "I will stop her. You will be safe."

Danny gave me a "who are you fooling?" look, and that hurt more than anything. My son didn't believe that I could defend him. Whether I really could or not didn't matter—the fact that he didn't think I could stabbed like a glass knife. I backed out from under the bed.

Keep moving, I told myself. If you stop, it'll all come crashing down on you.

I went into the living room. The carpet needed vacuuming, and a pile of bills sat on the coffee table. Several were unopened because I didn't want to know what they said, though the words glared at me through the envelopes. second notice. final notice. we pull fingernails. Our finances still hadn't recovered from the adoption. It hadn't helped that the bank had decided it couldn't afford to give us employees a raise this year, though I noticed the president still got his annual Lexus.

A Saturday summer breeze blew through the sliding door at the back of the house. Suddenly the house felt stifling, and I followed the air out to the back deck.

I like our backyard. Past the wooden deck I had laid with my own hands stretches half an acre of perfect emerald lawn. An oak tree and an ash are spaced perfectly between high privacy fences that separate us from the neighbors. In the right back corner stands the double-sized garden shed that doubles as my workshop. In the other corner sits the outdoor altar. It's a half-moon of shale roughly stacked to knee height, done in such a way as to create dozens of little shelves and alcoves. We tuck candles and charms and statues and anything else we deem appropriate there. The rear boundary of the back yard is a simple chain link fence. Beyond it, our world opens up into a nice meadow filled with creeks, hills, and abundant wildlife.

I strode across the perfect lawn. Yeah, yeah, yeah—I spend hours every weekend mowing, mulching, trimming, and weeding. No, I don't plant wildflowers or grow herbs. Sorry, I have no desire to dip my own candles, milk organic goats, or harvest my own granola. I want air conditioning, cable, and a hardware superstore less than fifteen minutes away. I use a weed-whacker to trim around my altar, and when my ritual candles go out, I relight them with a barbecue lighter. And I'm still a Wiccan Witch—or a Celtic warrior. Nothing in the Wiccan Rede or the Mabinogion says I have to live in the sixteenth century.

I knelt in the center of the stone crescent. Grass brushed my bare knees—I was wearing shorts with tennis shoes—and I felt my gaze drawn toward a small figure of Mother Berchte. She's a little-known German goddess of fire and chaos. When she shows up at the winter Solstice and opens up her sack, you never know if she's going to dump the gifts out or stuff the kids in. Not many Witches invoke her, but I've always liked her. Besides, talking out loud to her statue might help me figure out what to do. I started to cast a circle, then decided the hell with it and just waved my lighter in front of Berchte's face and sketched the rune for goddess. "What the hell is going on?" I snarled. "Why can't you guys leave us alone?"

"Wimp," Berchte said.

I dropped the lighter, scrabbled for it, then gave it up. I leaned in for a closer look. The Berchte statue stared back at me, her tiny eyes glittering in the late afternoon sunlight. She looked a little like Baba Yaga, though half her body was in shadow and half was in sunlight, and she wore a headcloth over her hair.

"What do you mean wimp?" I didn't know what else to say. I hadn't actually expected Berchte to talk to me. It had never happened before. On the other hand, Baba Yaga had never knocked on my front door before, either.

"I meant what I said, dearie." Her voice was small and raspy, like a rat-tail file. "Baba Yaga challenges you to fight, so you come out and whine at me? Wimp."

"It's not fair!" I snapped. "Collette and I worked and sacrificed and put ourselves into debt so we could adopt two children no one else wanted. Eva has developmental delays, Danny still doesn't trust me, creditors are knocking our door down, and now Baba Yaga wants to . . . to . . ." I thought of the stories about the cannibal Witch and my throat closed with fear. "We did something good, but our lives have only gotten harder as a result."

"What do you want?" Berchte said. "A bye?"

"Yeah!" I said, half laughing. "For one round of bad shit, I want a bye."

"Sorry, dearie. The universe doesn't work that way. No good deed goes unpunished, yada yada. You want to keep the kids, you'll have to fight."

"How, dammit?" I almost screamed. "I've read the stories about her. What am I supposed to do? Go to her house and tie her trees with ribbon? Feed bacon to her cat and put oil on her gate? That was a thousand years ago. She's the bitch queen of Ukraine. I'm a forty-year-old American Witch."

"I thought you were Collette's suburban Celtic warrior." Berchte smirked.

"Whichever. I can't beat her."

"That's why you're going to lose," Berchte said. "You've split your power in half and let Baba Yaga dictate the terms of the battle. Fight her with your weapons and you might have a chance." The figure went still.

An airplane screamed down from the sky and crashed into the grass beside me. I jumped, then plucked the toy from the ground. One of the wings was bent. I turned. Danilo was running toward me, remote in hand.

"Danny!" I called on Dad autopilot. "Be careful!"

Danilo held out his hand for the plane without looking at me. Remote control toys are his obsession, have been since we stepped off the plane in Detroit. Planes, cars, boats—if you can stick a radio in the engine, Danilo can operate it. The amateur psychologist who set up shop in my head the day we adopted him says the operant word is control. The toys do whatever Danilo wants, unlike his life.

"It's bent," I said, getting to my feet. "Come on—let's see if we can fix it."

I was heading into denial again, knew it, and didn't care. I'd earned five minutes in Egypt. Danilo followed me silently into the workshop-shed, and I jerked the string to turn on the overhead light. The familiar, calming smells of gasoline and sawdust hung on the air. Assorted gardening tools hung from the walls, each in its place. One half of the shed was taken up by my lawn tractor, a Deforester 3000. It's a behemoth you can harvest corn with, complete with a small trunk, attached Wet-Vac (handy for cleaning gutters), and an engine outfitted with explosive turbo-boost. The thing is way bigger than anything I need to maintain our little lawn, but it satisfies my inner urge to have an enormously powerful machine that obeys my every command, which is why I bought it. This was before the adoption took over our lives and finances, of course. I'd recently placed ads to sell it, though the thought of saying good-bye to old faithful and getting a push mower gave me a twinge. It would be like trading a war stallion for a moo-cow.

The other half of the shed was taken up by my workbench. My hand tools hung from hooks on the wall above it, and I had a decently clear space to work in. I set the model airplane on the bench. Danilo came in and leaned against it to watch while I selected a pair of rubber-coated pliers from the rack on the wall.

"These will straighten the wing without hurting it," I said.

Danny said nothing as I carefully used the pliers to right the wing. Once it was fixed, I gave it back to him and he gave me a small smile. I smiled back. A pure father-son moment. It was exactly the kind of thing I'd fantasized about while we were grinding through the endless forms and meetings that made up the adoption process.

"What you do about Baba Yaga?" Danny asked, and the moment crumbled to dust.

I sighed. "I don't know yet. But you don't have to worry. I'll take care of it. That's what dads do."

"Right." For a moment, Danny sounded exactly like an American teenager. "You not my real dad, and you can't stop Baba Yaga."

For a long, cold moment, I felt completely alone. Collette was gone. The coven was gone. It was just me against the most powerful fairy tale in the world. Behind a privacy fence, no one can hear you scream. But for Danny's sake, I kept my expression neutral as I knelt in front of him. Danilo is short for his age—a lifetime of bad nutrition at work. "No matter what you might think, you're a part of this family forever. And Baba Yaga never fought a Wiccan Witch or a Celtic warrior before."

"What is Celtic warrior?"

A loud crash stopped my answer. Both of us lunged for the shed door. Across the lawn I saw Baba Yaga stepping through the remains of our sliding glass door. In her arms she held Eva. Baba Yaga's wild hair writhed like gray snakes around the bejeweled golden comb. Eva was awake, her dark eyes wide, though she remained silent. Fear stabbed my heart with a frozen blade.

"No!" I whispered.

"Цe моя cecтpa!" Danny shouted, and ran toward her before I could react. A small part of my mind caught the Ukrainian words for my sister. Baba Yaga laughed a harsh, grating laugh and snatched Danny up with her free arm. He screamed, the airplane and remote still clutched in his hands. My body came to life then and I lunged for the witch. She blew a small puff of breath at me, and it knocked me backward like a cement fist. The buttons on my shirt popped off, laying my chest open to the afternoon air. I landed on my back and skidded across the grass. Hot pain thudded against my breastbone. The back of my shirt tore.

"Mine," Baba Yaga said.

"You said I had until sunset," I found myself shouting.

"And you're too obsessed with rules, Billy McCrae," she snorted.

I caught a glimpse of Danny's face. His expression mingled fear and resignation. He knew I wouldn't be able to save him, had known it all along. Baba Yaga stomped across the yard and I found myself wondering where her mortar was. Maybe it couldn't handle passengers. She kicked the chain link fence flat and strode out into the meadow beyond the subdivision.

I sat there on the grass, unable to comprehend what was going on. My heart pounded, my stomach felt like stone. It wasn't fair, it wasn't right. Baba Yaga was already receding into the distance, Danny and Eva looking over her shoulders at me with heartbreak in their eyes. I glanced at the altar. The Berchte figurine, normally facing outward, was facing to my right, toward the shed.

"You've split your power in half and let her dictate the terms. Fight her with your weapons and you might have a chance."

My terms. My weapons.

My shed.

I shucked the ruined shirt, bolted into the shed clad only in shorts and tennis shoes, and grabbed a few things from shelves and hooks—gas-powered hedge clippers, gas can, spare tools. I leaped onto the seat of my Deforester 3000 and twisted the key. It sprang to life with a lion's roar. I summoned all the magic twenty years of Wicca had taught me and started to sketch the Celtic rune for power on the mower's casing. Then I stopped. The Witch and warrior warred for dominance. The Witch wanted to fight magic with magic. The warrior called for blood. And neither one felt particularly strong.

I glanced around the shed. Perfect tools, powerful machinery, sharp blades. I was pretty good at magic, though not great. My inner Celtic warrior cried out for weapons, but suburban men—sensitive modern men—aren't allowed to have them. Hungry, I had turned to witchcraft for power and tried to placate the inner warrior with toys. The split had divided my strength in half. I had a chance against Baba Yaga, but only with full strength. I had to decide—Witch or warrior?

I looked around the shed again. The answer was clear. The rune died with a flick of my fingers. I slammed the mower into gear and hit the turbo boost. The mower leaped forward, and the back of the shed exploded in a billion shards. Without slowing, the Deforester 3000 bolted across the flattened fence into the meadow beyond. The speed almost unseated me, and I gripped the steering wheel like the reins of a war chariot.

The mower rushed up a rise nearly as fast as a galloping horse, leaving a strip of perfectly-mown meadow behind. I crested and saw Baba Yaga ahead of me, making for a clump of trees. She heard the mower's thunderous engine and turned in surprise. Danilo and Eva stared as well.

"Dada!" Eva screamed.

Baba Yaga's surprise didn't last long. From her apron she snatched the blue dishtowel with embroidered fishies and flung it between us. The towel hit the ground and rippled, shifted, widened. A full-blown river flowed across the rise in its place. I swore and hit the brakes. The Deforester 3000 roared in protest. The sound and smell of rushing water washed past me as the two of us came to a halt. Baba Yaga waved and continued on her way.

I didn't hesitate. I grabbed the mower's attached Wet-Vac, shoved the business end of the hose into river, and switched it on. The motor bellowed and water exploded out the rear of the vacuum like a firehose. The water level dropped, the river drained, and in seconds, the bed was dry.

Fear the suburban Celtic warrior and his weapons.

I blasted across the riverbed on my lawn tractor and in less than a minute was catching up to Baba Yaga again. This time Danilo looked amazed and a little relieved. Eva reached for me. Baba Yaga slapped my daughter's hands down and in that moment I burned to use the bitch's blood to smear war emblems on my bare chest. But before I could get close, Baba Yaga snatched the golden comb from her hair and threw it down between us.

The earth rumbled. I felt it even through the vibrations of the Deforester 3000. Green leaves poked up through the ground and burst into full-blown bushes and hedges so thick I couldn't see through them. I cut power to the mower, leaped off, and yanked the starter cord on my hedge trimmer. It purred to life. I swung the trimmer like a sword, and the blades I kept razor sharp sliced through twigs and leaves like green butter. Sticks scratched my bare chest and legs and tore my shorts, so I dashed back to the mower and grabbed the plastic lid off the Wet-Vac to hold in front of me. That helped. In less than a minute, I carved a rough path through and stepped out the other side, bleeding and nearly naked, but through.

Only then did I realize the opening was too narrow to bring the Deforester 3000 through. No time for self-recrimination. I ran. Two hills later, I caught up to Baba Yaga and the kids. She was waiting for me, Danilo on her left, Eva on her right. I stood less than an arm's length in front of her, hedge trimmer in one hand, Wet-Vac lid in the other. I couldn't read Eva's expression. Danilo looked scared. He was still clutching his airplane remote, but the airplane was nowhere in sight.

"No negotiation, no talk," I said. "Let them go, or I will kill you."

Baba Yaga laughed and held out an arm. I could see the thin violet light surrounding it and the rest of her body, the same light that had broken my wards. The light also surrounded the kids. "Try."

I swung the trimmer at her neck. She didn't even try to dodge. The humming blades bounced off the light, and I felt the shock all the way up my arm. Baba Yaga flicked a fist at me. I flung up the Wet-Vac lid. It shattered, and my arm went numb.

"You see?" she said. "You can't touch me. You never had a—"

And Eva bit her on the leg. She always gets cranky when someone wakes her early. Baba Yaga screeched in pain and surprise and the violet light went out. Just at that moment, Danny's airplane buzzed down from the sky and crashed straight into her left eye. Baba Yaga screeched again. I swung the trimmers with my good arm. The blades opened up a long gash across her chest. Dark red blood spilled out. It hissed where it touched the ground, and the grass withered and died. Baba Yaga staggered back. Some feeling had returned to my other arm. I scooped both kids behind me, then brandished the humming trimmers again.

"These children are mine," I said. "By water and wood and blood, I have proven they are mine. Leave now or you will die."

Baba Yaga, huge hands clutching at her wound, gave me a long, hard look. Then, to my surprise, she looked at Danilo. He glared back at her and clutched my arm.

"Miй отeць," Danny said fiercely.

Baba Yaga nodded once and turned to me. "You have earned the right. Warrior." And she vanished, blood and all.

All the strength left me. I sagged and used the hedge trimmers as a cane to prop myself up.

"Dada!" Eva said, and I picked her up. She buried her face in my bare neck, and I inhaled the safe scent of her dark hair.

Danilo tapped me on the arm. I looked down at him. He put his arms up like a child a third his age. "Dad?"

And I picked him up, too.

Then I had to put them down. Even suburban Celtic warriors caught in emotional dad moments have their limits.

On our way back, we discovered that all traces of the hedge had disappeared. The Deforester 3000 sat patiently in the middle of an empty meadow. It was scratched and dented, and one of the mower blades was broken. No way anyone would buy it now. Great. At least we could ride it home. Already I was wondering how we were going to pay to replace the damaged shed, rear fence, and sliding glass door. I also realized my shoulders were starting to sunburn. Berchte was right—the universe never gives you a bye. I boarded the mower with Eva and held out an arm to help Danny climb on.

"Dad, what this?"

Danilo was holding an object out to me. I took it and stared. It was Baba Yaga's golden comb, the one encrusted with glittering jewels. Sunlight sparkled off a diamond, a ruby, an emerald, a large black pearl, and other stones I couldn't name.

"Well?" Danny said. "What this?"

"I think" I said weakly, "it's a bye."

And the Deforester 3000 roared to life.

 

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