After a brief moment of collective panic, the palace plunged into a strong and healthy artificially induced dream.
A miserable fox was moving along the path slowly, fruitlessly ignoring the rumbling of her empty stomach. Ever since dawn, she had wanted to steal a chicken from the village, but the rooster had turned out to be so healthy, lively, and cunning that he attacked her almost before she had a chance to sneak into the coop. After being pecked in the nose repeatedly, the fox rushed back to the forest but ran into a dog that had been dozing off by the fence. Because of the rooster’s cries, the dog opened his eyes. It hadn’t immediately realized what the red creature running at him even was, but it still deftly snapped his jaws, chopping off a piece of the foxtail. The fox howled in pain and jumped over the fence, chased by the ferocious barking that kept echoing in her ears.
A sparrow flew by, quick as an arrow. The fox shivered and stopped, waiting for the sparrow to fly next to her nose again. She wouldn’t miss her chance. She would fill her stomach with food this time. But the sparrow wasn’t going to tempt the fate twice. It settled comfortably on the branch and said, “Hey, fox, you have really lost some weight here! How did you do that? Share your secret!”
The fox looked around.
“People have been searching for this secret for thousands of years, and you want me to spill it out? Just like that?” she grumbled.
“So what?” the sparrow looked surprised. “I’m not a human. Don’t be so greedy!”
“Well, I suppose I can whisper it into your ear. Fly over here.”
The sparrow giggled.
“Aye, I know all about your secret tricks!” it said. “You’d swallow me whole, tail and all! So no, thank you!”
The sparrow hopped from branch to branch, chirped goodbye and got away, almost colliding with Yaga who was flying about her business. The fox sighed. Yaga was so lucky! Even her hut had chicken legs. The fox’s belly, on the other hand, was basically eating itself at this point. Where was the fox’s happiness? Behind what mountains was it hiding?
Come out, come out, wherever you are!
In the evening, Baba Yaga was watching the farthest house in the village through a telescope. She didn’t care much about the house. Her attention was focused on the goat Ivan who was running about the yard. Yaga watched him until she heard a wild neighing echoing in the sky.
“What are those strange sounds?” she marveled, angrily directing the telescope up and looking for the celestial laughter. “I wonder which of them is laughing, the horse or Kashchey? I can bet he has arranged that lighting show of his again! And who are they transporting? Is that… is that Princess Maria? What an idiot! Doesn’t Kashchey know what he’s gotten himself into? Little children caused more problems than they were worth, and an angry princess will bring him to his grave, immortal or not!”
“And soon, he may be the only living person left on the planet… Cat Bayun, the lulling cat that lived in the distant western forests, had brought the terrible news of a new invasion of vampires. They had all been allegedly destroyed five thousand years ago, but apparently, some cunning wretch had managed to hide in a secluded corner. While the vampire was in hiding, humanity appeared and played right into his hands. People lacked immunity against the vampires, and after being bitten, they themselves turned into lovers of fresh blood. And now the vampire decided to get even for all the insults he’d endured by wiping out the distant descendants of those who had destroyed his kin.”
“Fight those beasts yet again and at the end of it, we’ll have to say goodbye to all our nerve cells,” Yaga muttered. “The amount of blood they’ll suck out of you, it’s downright scary!”
There had been no news from the old warriors. Yaga seemed to be the only one left. Over thousands of years, many of them had scattered around the planet. Some had died a long time ago, and there was no time to gather the remaining living ones. The vampires would destroy humanity a lot quicker.
Yaga would have to fight alone, unless Cat Bayun found somebody from the old crowd. But first, she needed to protect her back. The potion for temporary mutations had been created thousands of years ago would have been most welcome, but the recipe was long lost. Before, it had been used against the vampires by changing their form and turning them into sedentary creatures that were easy to kill. Vampires developed an immunity against it very quickly, and the potion had to be “buried” in the depth of time. Yaga doubted that anything had changed in the past 5,000 years. Vampires were pernicious and could outlive even cockroaches. But that potion could be given to people to turn them into animals whose blood the vampires didn’t drink. To restore the formula, Yaga had to carefully combine all the components and conduct tests on volunteers that actually had no idea they were volunteers. They just wanted to drink some water from a puddle.
And now, she needed to catch that goat, study the effects of the restored potion on the human body, and, on the basis of that data, derive the formula of the potion for long-term transformation of a person into a beast. Preferably into a savage and ferocious one. If the vampire army was to be replenished with people, it was vital to make them impossible to find. It would be easy to catch the goat by flying into the village on the broom, but Yaga dismissed this idea immediately. There had already been rumors that the disappearances of people, animals, and birds were her doing. A volunteer was needed.
Their dog, maybe? A nice dog loved to play and hunt, so it would gladly chase a goat. So, her plan entailed the following: to sic the dog on the goat, lure them both into the forest, then capture the goat and fly away as fast as possible to the hut. The dog would be free to run and hunt freely in the woods… until it met its wild ancestors, that was. That would be something to remember if it managed to escape from their hospitality.
But there was a problem: the goat wasn’t really a goat, so it wouldn’t be scared off by a familiar dog. Well… Yaga would have to take Alena’s house by storm, then.
“I don’t like it…” Yaga mumbled, folding the telescope and stuffing it in the pocket. “Where did these vampires even come from? And how did these people show up out of the blue.”
She sighed. There were more and more mysteries appearing every year. And then a sudden thought popped up in her head… What if she hypnotized the dog? What if she persuaded it that it adored bringing small goats directly to Yaga’s house!?
It wasn’t a bad idea at all. It was at least worth trying.
Kashchey hadn’t been flying on his ghostly horse for long, but he got so tired from having to hold the princess and fight the oncoming gust of wind along with turbulence that he almost fell from the saddle when the horse landed. It stopped in front of a hidden entrance to the castle on the flat roof of one of the four allegedly decorative turrets. The secret doors opened, and Kashchey entered the spacious turret and pressed the button. A high-speed elevator crossed the distance of forty meters in one swoop and stopped at the second floor, which was used mainly for storage of various stuff. Upon opening the door to the ever-vacant guest room, Kashchey put the sleeping princess on the bed and quietly walked away.