Baba Yaga is standing above a familiar, broken-looking female body sprawled like a corpse at a crime scene. Only the chalk outline is missing.
There’s a giant iron-cast skillet in Baba Yaga’s hand with blood smeared on it. A welt on the head of the limp body matches that part of the skillet.
“Thanks to this attack, you voided my contract with Nero,” Baba Yaga says to the body. “Now I can take care of you for good.”
Though I don’t usually feel emotions in this state, an arctic chill permeates through my bodiless being.
No wonder that body is familiar.
It’s mine.
In fact, I’ve seen myself this way once before—during the fight with Beatrice, after she killed me inside a vision. That time, I was able to prevent that fate by changing the circumstances that led to it.
Hopefully, I can do the same thing this time around.
Someone steps on a piece of metal behind Baba Yaga.
It’s Kit.
She’s aiming a shotgun at Baba Yaga’s head.
Before the old witch can turn, Kit presses the trigger.
The gun clicks futilely—must be jammed or out of bullets.
“Looks like I get your Council seat, after all.” Baba Yaga spins around to stare at Kit with a carnivorous smile. “I had my people try to shoot you, then blow you up to no avail. Now you come to me voluntarily—and I get to make everything look like a legitimate suicide. How—”
Without finishing the tirade, Baba Yaga tosses the heavy skillet at Kit’s head.
Kit must’ve been caught off guard by Baba Yaga’s confession because she doesn’t dodge the projectile, and the skillet smacks her in the head.
Kit staggers.
Just like in the vision about Vlad, Baba Yaga lifts her arm.
Black energy forms on each of her fingertips.
She seems to age a few decades under the effort before the energy shoots out.
Only it doesn’t fly at Kit.
It arcs from Kit to the unmoving Sasha on the floor.
Why shoot there?
Then I see it.
The Jubilee necklace with that giant stone.
It’s still on my neck, and it absorbs Baba Yaga’s energy—the way a ring Rose once gave me did.
Of course. This is why Rose asked me to bring it.
She knew who Koschei works for, and what might happen after her death.
Leave it to Rose to exact one last revenge from beyond the grave.
Kit recovers from the hit and smirks, seeing the situation.
Then she grows and morphs into a drekavac—a nightmarish xenomorph-meets-dementor creature we learned about at the last Orientation.
“No,” the weakened Baba Yaga pleads. “Just shoot me. Don’t—”
Drekavac-Kit stalks up to Baba Yaga and reaches out with multiple pustule-infested limbs.
Baba Yaga’s tortured scream isn’t recognizable as coming from a throat. It sounds more like some hellish string instrument playing a single, glass-shattering note.
Writhing and twitching so hard she probably tears her own ligaments, the old witch collapses on the ground.
Kit looms over her victim.
A horrific-looking tongue slowly snakes out of the drekavac’s maw.
Wherever the thing licks Baba Yaga’s skin, it melts away as though it never existed, leaving behind raw meat.
“Getting killed by a drekavac is the worst fate that can befall anyone,” Dr. Hekima had said, and clearly, he hadn’t exaggerated.
If I had a body, I’d be vomiting.
On the third lick, Baba Yaga’s throat produces one last agonized scream; then she slumps, blissfully dead.
Kit turns herself into an orc, kicks Baba Yaga’s remains to the side, and walks up to my unmoving body.
Carefully picking me up, the orc strides toward the restaurant exit.