Bound: A Slavic Urban Fantasy Series (Kozlov Chronicles Book 2) Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by Elena Sobol All rights reserved. No

  portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the

  publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. No part of this book may

  be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission

  except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or

  reviews. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and

  incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used

  fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or

  locales, are entirely coincidental.

  Author website: www.elenasobol.net

  Front Cover: coversbychristian.com

  Editing: copybykath.com

  Contents

  1. CHAPTER ONE

  2. CHAPTER TWO

  3. CHAPTER THREE

  4. CHAPTER FOUR

  5. CHAPTER FIVE

  6. CHAPTER SIX

  7. CHAPTER SEVEN

  8. CHAPTER EIGHT

  9. CHAPTER NINE

  10. CHAPTER TEN

  11. CHAPTER ELEVEN

  12. CHAPTER TWELVE

  13. CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  14. CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  15. CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  16. CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  17. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  18. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  19. CHAPTER NINETEEN

  20. CHAPTER TWENTY

  21. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  22. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  23. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  24. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  25. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  26. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Author's Note

  1

  Next time when you feel like a real bad-ass, check yourself. It’s entirely possible you’re about to fall on the aforementioned ass. Bad.

  I sure felt pretty cool when I drew my mother’s famous Bow of Fate. Veter, the wind dagger, was my arrow. Sila, the strength, had turned into the golden body of the bow. Shimmering with its multi-hued fibers, the string that tied my daggers together glistened in the sunlight. I breathed through my nose and out my mouth like Leshi taught me. The god of the forest had been drilling archery into my head for the last three months. My eyes focused past the string and on the target.

  “You can do it to-to-to!” the wood spirits chanted in unison. Their twiggy wings buzzed as they struggled to keep the block of wood in the air. It took three of the little fae to hold it. The others whirled around like overgrown dragonflies. Was that as dangerous as firing a cannon at a bowl of fruit? Yep. But hey, they insisted, and I’m not a Supernatural Creatures Endangerment Committee. “Fire, Master Dmitry, fire to-to-to!”

  You gotta give the people what they want.

  Exhaling, I let Veter fly. The arrow only vaguely resembled the dagger I was used to, but it sang through the air with familiar surety. At first, anyway. Then, it did something it’d been doing for weeks. The opposite of what I wanted.

  The arrow split fifteen different ways. Instead of one exact shot, the dagger turned into projectiles that wobbled as they turned to aim at everything in sight.

  Sila bucked in my hands. It hit me on the mouth hard enough to wobble my front teeth and send me flying back. From the ground, I saw the arrows hit every tree, boulder, and bush in the clearing. The shrill of escaping wood sprites filled my ears. Explosions deafened me. My hands wrapped around my head. I curled up on the ground, praying to Veles to allow me to be the exception to the rule and not shit my pants as I got blown to bits.

  When the bangs stopped, I opened an eye. All I saw was smoke. A gentle breeze tugged at my hair and my clothes. Feeling like I’d just been crushed by a tractor, I stumbled to my feet.

  A patch of green grass surrounded me. Sila lay at my side. The blade smoldered. I picked it up, hissing as the hot handle burned my palm. Switching it back and forth between my hands like a hot potato, I slid it into its sheath.

  The birch grove was flattened. Stumps of trees smoked against the blue-and-pink sky of Vyraj, the Slavic pantheon. I looked around for the heart-wrenching sight of small sprite bodies, but there were none. Thank the gods for that. The patch of green around me looked suspiciously uniform. What had protected me? I wiped the blood off my upper lip and only then noticed that I wasn’t alone.

  A woman watched me with attentive blue eyes so pale she looked almost blind. White hair cascaded down her shoulders and her nose ended in a distinctive hook. She looked anywhere between sixty and a thousand years old, yet no one would be dumb enough to call her “old.” The woman looked as immune to time as a pyramid. She leaned on a staff that vaguely resembled an over-sized pestle. Baba Yaga, the supposed eater of children, destroyer of princes, and an absolute terror of the Slavic world smiled at me. Her expression of pity was mixed with tenderness. It made me feel like even more of an idiot.

  “In one piece, are you?” she asked. “I just received my grandson back. And there he goes blowing himself up.”

  “Thanks, Babushka,” I said. After three months of regular visits, my Old Slav was smoother than it had been in years. Small mercies. “Sorry I flattened another grove.”

  The walk back to my grandmother’s house was a bit of a blur. The chicken hut was resting in the midsummer heat. When I was six years old, I’d named the hut “Kura,” which literally meant “chicken”. I wasn’t a very imaginative kid. Its legs half-buried into the warm soil below, the magic hut barely moved as we approached. When I came back home in June, it had remembered me. And a good thing, too. Once, I saw it kick a trespassing troll a hundred feet in the air. We never saw the troll again.

  “Hut, hut,” my grandmother said. “Turn your back to the forest and your front to me.”

  The ancient spell rippled the air, and the hut lowered its porch in front of us.

  “You should rest, Dmitry,” Baba Yaga said. “I’ll make us tea.”

  Bless that woman.

  My vision stopped spinning somewhere between the front door and my room. I barely found my way to my wooden four-poster bed. Around me, my old room was as Spartan as it had been when I was growing up—a single window that shone light on the wall carpets, the slanting ceiling, a simple chest for clothes, and my mother’s portrait. I collapsed on top of the covers and let dizziness take me.

  When I came to, I saw a wood sprite hovering over me with a bloody towel he’d just lifted off my face. The charred state of his wings made guilt nibble my guts. I took the towel from him. After almost blowing him up, I could dab my own damn lip.

  “Are your friends ok?”

  He chirped and did an awkward mid-air flip. “We are quick to-to-to!”

  I sighed. They were quick the last time, too. And the time before that. Ever since my cousin Golo almost burned my human city to the ground, I’d been training night and day. Back in June, I’d claimed my godpower after almost a decade of dodging my demigod responsibilities. The result was that I had a target on my back. My cousins, the children of Likho the One-Eyed, the goddess of bad fortune, were coming. Today, tomorrow, or months from now. I was the only thing standing between them and the world. Unfortunately, claiming my legacy had made my trusty daggers go wonky on me. I sat up on the bed, and took my mother’s ancient needles from their sheath. With an effort of will, I turned them into a pair of daggers.

  Sila, the power dagger, now carried a jagged edge. Veter, the wind dagger, was slim, sky-blue, and practically weightless. I’d used them for years. Now, they felt foreign
in my hands.

  When I came back to Vyraj, my grandmother explained that my mother’s primary weapon was something called a Bow of Fate. One blow from it turned wrong into right, and slaughtered enemies in droves. I believed the “slaughtered” part. I was also pretty sure that blowing up acres of the forest wasn’t supposed to happen. At least I was much harder to kill these days.

  Until I mastered my mother’s weapon, I was as good as useless. More than useless. I was a gods-damned health hazard.

  Looking up, I found my mother’s portrait over my bed. It was the same as I’d remembered—a beautiful stranger with a braid over her shoulder and the classic Slavic features of a tall forehead and wide-set eyes. Now that I was grown, I recognized the shadow of worry in her expression and the determination in the line of her angular jaw. I had inherited both. Dolya had a lot resting on her shoulders. When I was a kid, I saw tenderness in her face. Today, I only saw her failed expectations. I swung my legs out of bed.

  “Today was a disaster,” I said to no one in particular. “I really need to stop messing up.”

  “Perhaps, Master Dmitry, something isn’t quite right to-to-to.” The sprite buzzed around the room like a giant mosquito. I had almost forgotten about him. “You should play to your strengths maybe to-to-to?”

  “Yeah, and what’s that?” I asked. “Flattening vegetation?”

  The smell of frying potato made me drift toward the kitchen. A towel to my lip, I pushed open the door.

  “Smells good,” I said.

  Baba Yaga looked up from the stove and her chin bobbed. “Your favorite, Dimmy.”

  I sat at the long wooden table and looked beyond her hunched form into the rest of the house. It was as deceptive as my babushka’s ordinary appearance. There was nothing ordinary about the Yaga’s hut. For starters, it was about four times bigger than it looked from the outside. Etchings covered the walls. They were spells that were older than time. Even the herbs that hung over the wide-mouthed stove were deceptive in their cozy appearance. Half of them could kill a herd of elephants. At night, the hut turned into a neon cave lit by mushrooms ravers could only dream of. And yet, that wasn’t the weirdest thing about the hut. Sitting on top of the can-lined shelf was an honest-to-gods microwave. I had no idea where my grandmother had gotten it or why. It’s not like the pantheon full of gods and monsters ran its own electric grid.

  “I saw you walking around again last night,” Baba Yaga said as she placed a steaming plate of potato hotcakes in front of me.

  I smeared a layer of sour cream over the steaming disks. My stomach nudged me at the smell. Mmmm.

  “I just needed some fresh air,” I lied.

  Her spatula struck my clavicle.

  “Owe,” I murmured.

  “Don’t lie to your babushka,” she said.

  That almost made me smile. I rubbed my shoulder and admitted:

  “Had that nightmare again.”

  “The one with the wolves?” she asked. I nodded. “You know your cousins can’t hunt you here. My wards won’t allow it. You have to sleep.”

  “Once I get the Bow of Fate down, I’ll sleep,” I said.

  “You’re wearing yourself thin.” She piled three more hotcakes onto my plate, then poured mushroom sauce over the small mountain. “Eat more.”

  I grinned. My friend Min-Ho, a Korean goblin and the meanest gym partner on the planet, would have a conniption if he knew how many carbs I ate in Vyraj. Then, I remembered that it was Sunday night, and I’d have to go home soon. I stuffed my face with a vengeance.

  She watched me eat with the tenderness only grandmothers are capable of. I had to admit that I had missed her care. Had starved for it in the eight years I’d dodged my responsibilities. Three months ago, she had taken me back without hesitation. Unfortunately, my cousins knew where I lived now. But then on the flip side, I got babushka’s cooking back.

  “Your mother lives within you, Dmitry,” she said. “You will find her power, even if it takes years.”

  I shrugged and swallowed another oily, potatoey, delicious bite. It didn’t taste as blissful as ten seconds ago.

  “Somehow,” I said, “I doubt I have that long.”

  A knock came from the door, and my grandmother snapped her fingers. It opened by itself, and the doorway revealed a girl with blue hair that fell to her shoulders. She froze with her fist in mid-air.

  I smiled at her puzzlement. “Hey, Alysa,”

  I looked at my phone. Here in Vyraj, it mostly served as a brick, but it still ran the time in Salt Lake City, my human home. It was already eight pm. I had to open the warehouse tomorrow, and fill an order heading to a brewery in Moab. All by my lonesome, because thanks to my shitty karma lately, nobody wanted to work for me. And I thought Golo was the demigod of bad luck.

  I gathered my backpack, hugged my grandmother, and headed outside.

  “Come back when you can, you hear?” My grandmother waved from the doorstep. “And by Veles, lad, get some sleep!”

  Alysa and I walked the glade that separated the hut on chicken legs from the Mavki Forest. The blue-pink sky had turned the violet of dusk. Now that I was a full demigod, I could teleport to Vyraj straight from my bedroom in Salt Lake City. My house spirit, Domo, and I made enough energy to step between realities without Alysa’s help. Unfortunately, it didn’t work in the other direction. First time I tried to go home from Vyraj on my own, I had ended up in a no-name village in Slovakia. The locals were very confused. Apparently, I could only travel back to Yav in places where the belief in the old Slavic gods was strong. After a brief stint at the local police station, I was able to call Utah. Thank the gods for international cell phone plans. Alysa came and got me, then laughed all the way home. That was the benefit of being the only living portal on earth. The world was her oyster.

  “How’s training going?” she asked with a pointed look at my split lip.

  “Oh, you know, peachy,” I said. “Flattening groves, blowing out my knees. Running out of time. I need a beer, like, yesterday.”

  She snorted. “Luckily, you have an entire warehouse of it. Have you found someone to take your nights, or are you still pulling double shifts?”

  I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Can you please stop asking me about my failures? Kinda rude.”

  “What about that guy last week—Wayne something?” she pressed. “I thought he was wetting his shorts to do part time.”

  “He mysteriously disappeared,” I said sourly. “Well, not that mysteriously. After two interviews and dropping off his cactus, he texted that he was offered another opportunity.”

  “Did you keep the cactus?” she asked.

  “You know I did,” I said. “As compensation for emotional distress.”

  She laughed and I looked at her from the corner of my eye. Ever since our scrape with death in June, we’d been more at ease with each other. She’d started hanging out at my house just because. That had never happened before. Sometimes, when she turned into her animal form—an adorable blue ferret—she napped in my garden. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t like it. We were still friends, but it was different somehow.

  My fatigue was suddenly gone. “Should we go for a walk?” I asked. “I kinda dread going home.”

  Her face changed as her eyes shifted to me. Uh-oh. She thought I was flirting with her. Was I?

  “I thought you were in a hurry,” she said.

  “Well, I just thought—”

  My attempts at covering up were rudely interrupted by a burst of flames on our path. Smoke billowed up in the air. A dark shape materialized and I’d be liar if I said I didn’t squeak.

  A giant fire cat, and one of Golo’s thralls, stood in our way. I recovered quickly, daggers at the ready. Alysa ducked behind my shoulder.

  Fire rolled out of its eyes and lit the tip of its tail. Its maw opened over a row of sharp teeth. I was expecting one of its horrible guttural meows, and got an even nastier surprise. A voice, that sounded smokier than a can of sardines, came sl
ithering out of its mouth.

  “Time’s up cousin,” Golo’s coughing chuckle filled my ears. “One is coming for you. But who? Who are you, who, who, who, who?” he sang in a creaky baritone.

  The transmission from its master delivered, the ovinnik rushed me. I shielded myself and Alysa with crossed daggers. I already knew from experience that throwing things at the pyro cat was pointless. Two seconds before a blistering collision, it exploded into a shower of sparks and flared up into the sky. I watched it disappear.

  “Now,” I said to Alysa, “I am in a hurry.”

  2

  When I got home, I ran up the porch steps with sweat rolling into my eyes. My post-pantheon travel nausea barely registered. Behind me, I heard Alysa run up the steps to keep up.

  "Dmitry—" she gasped. "Hang on!"

  My eyes widened and my nostrils flared as I saw things strewn around the front yard. It was utter chaos—boxes and clothes and what looked like a broken chair—were heaped in front of the bushes. Someone had gotten into the house, and I hadn't been there to protect it.

  The door was ajar, and I burst into the living room. My shoulder slammed into the door as I cocked Sila at whoever had invaded my home. Two pairs of red eyes stared at me from the depth of the living room. The contrast between outdoors and indoors blinded me. All I saw were shapes.

  "Who's in here?" I demanded.

  "Whoa, dude!" A familiar voice sounded from the fireplace. A light flicked on and I saw my roommate's curly hair. James' eyes were wide at my combative stance. "Chill, bro!"

  Coria, my other roommate and a dark elf, sat on the floor in front of a black leather suitcase. She raised an eyebrow at me. Her armiger, Tynan, stood impassively by the wall. His giant form was relaxed and he regarded me as if I wasn't even a threat. What an ass.

  "If you're going to kill me," Coria said, "at least let me say hello to your cute companion first."

  Alysa tee-heed behind me, and Coria gave her a lusty smile. Now there was a woman who was not afraid to flirt with the shifter. My hands dropped and I exhaled relief.