Baba Yaga raised her voice to cut through the muttering and bickering. “These men think you can help. But they say you demanded an audience with me.” She flinched, slightly, as if she’d tried to make a gesture. “So here we are. Have you come to apologize?”

Apologize? To her? Had everyone gone crazy? Maybe Mollie was still stuck inside the evil insanity bubble and only thought she’d escaped it. “No fucking way. I owe you nothing, you evil hag.”

“Mollie.” Franny tapped his wristwatch. “We are sort of on the clock here, okay? So if you could speed it along a little bit.”

“Fine.” A doorway to Idaho opened in the middle of the hospital room. Perhaps because she was too angry to remember to be afraid, this portal didn’t resist her quite as much as the others had over the past day. A cold wind ruffled her hair and set the wires of Baba Yaga’s monitors to swaying. A whiff of manure permeated the room. Baba Yaga twisted her mouth in a moue of distaste.

“Hey, wait—” Mollie stepped into the barn, grabbed the Louis XIV chair, and popped back to the hospital before Franny could finish his sentence. “—a second.”

Billy Ray blinked at the chair. “What. The hell. Is that?”

“This is my condition for helping you. You don’t like it, you can go to hell.”

But Franny knew. She could see it in his eyes. He looked genuinely sad for her. She didn’t like it. “Was this somebody you cared about?”

“He is somebody I care about.” Mollie lugged the chair to the side of Baba Yaga’s hospital bed. “Change him back.”

The Russian woman blinked at her. “This is your condition? You thought I would do this and then you would do your part?”

The goddamned tears had come back. Everything turned blurry. “Change him back. Make him a person again!”

The hag shook her wrinkly head.

“Change him back RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”

Franny tried to interject. “Mollie—”

“I can’t,” said the Russian woman.

“You will. Turn Ffodor back right fucking now or I swear to God I will dump your leathery old ass into the Pacific Ocean a thousand miles from the middle of nowhere.”

“Mollie.” Franny took her arm. He tried to pull her aside but she wasn’t about to let go of Ffodor. “She didn’t say she wouldn’t. She said she can’t.”

Mollie rounded on him. “Of course she can. She has to.” She wept openly now. “You have to turn him back.”

“I can’t.”

Billy Ray said, “I think she’s telling you it’s one-way, kid.”

No. No. No.

Mollie lifted the heavy chair, shook it at Baba Yaga. Sorrow made her strong. “You have to turn him back so that I can apologize to him.”

Baba Yaga closed her eyes. Shook her head.