Chico grabbed the money and stuffed it in his back pocket, cuffing Kenny on the head and giving him a little push toward the gangplank. “You maybe would rather stay here and scrub the deck some more? Come on—we go get coffee. Maybe we can find someplace to buy you some brains too.” The older man gave Beka an encouraging smile as he passed her. “Buena suerte, chica.”
Beka thought she was going to need more than good luck. She was going to need a miracle.
* * *
MARCUS HAD NEVER been so happy to see someone in his entire life. Even though Beka looked like crap; she was pasty white under her tan, and her dark circles had dark circles. If he had a little more ego, he’d think she’d been pining for him. But he was pretty sure that wasn’t it. For the moment, he was just glad she was here. He’d find out why soon enough.
“You brought Chewie,” he said, for lack of anything more intelligent to say.
“Yes. Actually, he’s kind of why I’m here.” If he didn’t know Beka better, he’d swear she looked guilty. Obviously she was up to something, but it wasn’t diving, because she didn’t have any gear with her.
“Why don’t you come on board and tell me about it,” he said, and was rewarded by a shadow of her usual sunny smile. He realized with a shock that she hadn’t even been sure he’d let her on board.
He gave her a hand onto the boat, the dog bounding after her with a thump that shook the entire ship. “Hey,” he said softly, still holding on to her hand and gazing down into those amazing azure eyes. “You look terrible. Are you okay?”
Beka gave a tired laugh. “Still the charmer, eh?” Chewie woofed in what might have been agreement.
Marcus shook his head. “If you want charming, I’m afraid you’ll have to stick with your friend the Irishman. Or prince, or whatever he is.”
She pulled her hand out of his but didn’t move away from him. “He’s a rat and a murderer, actually. And he turns out to be behind both the problem I was trying to find a way to fix and the disappearing fish. That’s why I’m here. I need your help to stop him.”
Sonofabitch! He knew he didn’t trust that guy. “I’d be happy to stop him. Permanently, if necessary. But maybe you’d better tell me what the hell is going on. Obviously, I’ve missed a part of the story.” His own fault, for walking away just when it was getting good. Not a mistake he planned on making again, if he could help it.
Marcus guided Beka over to sit on a bench, Chewie sticking close to their heels.
“I’m sorry,” he and Beka both said at the same time. She looked startled, eyes so wide he could almost see the ocean in their depths.
“You’re sorry?” she said. “What are you sorry for? I’m the one who didn’t tell you the truth from the beginning and let you think I was a normal woman.”
Marcus snorted. “I never thought you were normal, Beka. Hell, the first time I met you, I fished you out of the sea in a net. But normal is highly overrated.” He wanted so badly to reach out and hold her, but he was afraid she’d pull away if he tried. “I’m sorry I overreacted when you told me who—what—you really are. You’re still Beka, and I should have realized that.”
“Oh, for the love of Poseidon, could the two of you please just kiss and make up and get it over with? I need to get out and back again as soon as possible; we don’t have time for all this romantic crap,” a deep voice said.
Marcus looked around, trying to figure out who the hell was talking. With a shock, he realized it was Chewie.
“Holy shit—your dog can talk!” He almost fell off the bench, and Beka tried not to snicker.
“Of course I can talk, you twit,” Chewie said. “I’m not a dog. I’m a dragon disguised as a dog. Have you ever met a dragon that couldn’t talk?”
Marcus glanced around to make sure no one else could hear them. “You’re the first dragon I’ve ever met, as far as I know.”
Beka took pity on him. “Don’t worry. No one else can understand him unless he wants them to. But Chewie’s right, we shouldn’t stay away from the bus any longer than we have to. He’s really not supposed to be gone at all. But I need him. And the Wily Serpent, if you’re willing to take me out one more time.”
She quickly explained to him what the Riders had discovered, finishing up with the events of the night before. Marcus swallowed hard, clenching his hands into tight fists when he thought about how close Beka had been to a man who could murder someone in cold blood. Since Marcus had come back from Afghanistan, he’d felt like a killer masquerading as a civilized person. But he suddenly realized that compared to some, he was very civilized indeed.
Although that could easily change, if he ever came face-to-face with Kesh.
“So what is this plan of yours?” he asked when she was done. “And what does it have to do with Chewie and my boat?”
Beka patted her not-a-dog on the head. “Do you know anything about Newfoundlands?” she asked.
“Only the stuff you told me that first day,” Marcus said. “About how they’re specially bred to work in the water, and that they can swim really well. I thought that was pretty cool.”
“Damn straight,” Chewie said, preening a little.
“You are the coolest dragon-dog in town,” Beka said with a fond smile. But she got serious again when she looked back at Marcus. “There’s a reason he picked this shape for his doggy guise,” she said. “He’s not just any dragon; he’s a water dragon. Water is as much his element as it is mine. More, in fact, since the pressure below doesn’t bother him at all, and he can dive much deeper than I ever could.”
She took a deep breath as she told him the rest of it. “If you’re willing to take us back out there, Chewie is going to dive down to the bottom of the Monterey Trench, and see if he can find whatever Kesh has hidden down there. Then he’s going to bring it back up so I can figure out how to restore the water and the people to health, and prove to the Queen once and for all that I have what it takes to be a Baba Yaga. And it has to happen before the full moon, so I’m running out of time.”
Marcus could see her desperation and her fear. He also saw her determination to see this through, no matter what it took. He thanked his lucky stars that she’d worked up the courage to come ask for his help, because he sure as hell wasn’t letting her do this without him.
Not only did he want to kick Kesh’s ass for chasing away the fish and driving a lot of good men like his father to the brink of losing everything, not to mention messing up their nets and whatever mischief he and his pals had been up to—although god knew, that was reason enough to go after the guy.
But he also wanted to sit on the slimy creep until he admitted to whatever he’d done to Beka and promised to fix it. Because no matter what she said, she really wasn’t okay. And Marcus had the sneaking suspicion that Kesh had something to do with it.
“You bet I’ll take you out there,” he said with an only slightly bloodthirsty grin. “Any chance we’ll meet up with your pal Kesh when we’re there? Because I’ve got a couple of things to say to him the next time we meet.”
Ooh-rah.
TWENTY-THREE
THE FRESH AIR and the feel of the spray on her face revived Beka enough that she actually enjoyed the trip out to the dive site. Although the fact that Marcus seemed to have gotten over being mad at her might have helped too. Just a little.
Once they’d arrived, Marcus looked at Chewie dubiously. “What now?” he asked.
“Now you stand back,” Chewie said.
Marcus shifted about a foot and Chewie snorted, a small hint of flame briefly curling through the salty air.
“Seriously, dude. Way back.”
Beka grabbed Marcus’s arm, only momentarily distracted by the feel of his muscles under her hand. “Brace yourself,” she said, grinning at him. She loved this part.
Marcus looked puzzled, then alarmed, then just plain stunned as Chewie began to shimmer and glow, the massive black Newfoundland replaced by a truly enormous dragon with a long, sinuous neck, tightly overl
apping metallic-looking scales, and a tail that wrapped halfway around the front cabin. As a dog, he’d been impressive. As a dragon, he was magnificent; a vibrant royal blue starting at his wedge-shaped head and then shading down through aqua and into a deep green, all glimmering with a deep iridescence like the inside of a shell.
Beka beamed at the dragon proudly. “Kind of cool, isn’t he?”
Marcus gazed from her to Chewie, his eyes wide and round, his jaw hanging. After a moment, he snapped it shut, shook his head, and said, “Kind of cool, Beka? Kind of cool? He’s fucking glorious.”
Chewie preened, as much as a dragon could be said to do so, and Beka hid a grin behind one hand. “Oh great,” she said. “Now there will be no living with him at all.”
“How can he do that?” Marcus asked, still staring at the gigantic dragon sprawled across his father’s deck. “He was small. Well, he was huge for a dog, but still not . . .” He waved at Chewie’s current form. “Not this. It shouldn’t be possible.”
Beka tried not to laugh. After all, this was his first dragon. It took some getting used to. “Says who?” she asked. “Einstein? He got a few things wrong. Physicists never enter magic into the equation.”
Marcus opened his mouth, closed it again, then just shook his head. “Wow. First witches then dragons.” He looked as if his entire worldview had changed in a second. Which it probably had. “I hate to think what that makes me—the talking frog?”
Chewie nudged him with one webbed foot, claws carefully sheathed. “It makes you in the way, dude.” He nodded to Beka, then half climbed, half slithered over the side of the boat, disappearing under the water without so much as a splash.
“Holy crap.” Marcus sat down rapidly on the nearest flat surface.
“Yep,” Beka said, scooting him over so she could sit next to him. “Now you can see why I didn’t want to try renting a different boat to take him out on. There’s not a distraction big enough in the world to keep people from noticing him when he is in dragon form.”
Marcus didn’t say anything for a minute, so she turned to look at him.
“What?” she asked.
He shrugged broad shoulders. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess part of me hoped that you’d come to me because you trusted me to help. And because maybe you missed me, just a little.”
Beka took a deep breath. “Just a little? Hell, Marcus, it felt like I was missing half my soul.” She felt like an idiot saying it, but at least it was the truth. After everything that had happened, she owed him that.
His hazel eyes stared into hers, as if he could read her mind, or maybe her heart, which stuttered and skipped as if it only half remembered how to beat.
Then he said in a low, fervent voice, “I think I found it for you.” He pulled her into his arms, wrapping her in strength and warmth and longing, tugging her in close until his lips met hers. Soft yet firm, they pressed against her own until she parted for him without thought, his tongue dipping in for a moment as if to taste the words she hadn’t said yet.
He drew back long enough to say, “God, I missed you, Beka.” Then there was only the silken slide of his lips and the glory of his hands and the passionate heat and joy that came from being in his arms once more.
* * *
MARCUS FELT LIKE he could kiss Beka forever. It was as if the universe had granted him a second chance. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to blow it this time. This time he was going to hold on to her and never let her go.
Or at least not until someone dumped a bucket of cold water over him.
Sputtering, he turned around to see Chewie, still amazing in scales and long, sharp teeth and shining, curved claws the purple-black of mussel shells. And water. Lots and lots of water.
Chewie shook himself again, like the dog he usually was, and doused Marcus and Beka with another couple of gallons of seawater. “Oh, sorry,” he said, glowing golden eyes innocent. “I didn’t see you there. Did I get you wet?”
Beka pulled away, half laughing and half scowling, and leaving Marcus feeling absurdly bereft. He wanted to grab her and drag her back into his arms, but the moment had clearly passed. He’d just have to make sure there was another one. Soon.
She grew more serious as she noted Chewie’s empty hands. Paws. Whatever.
“Weren’t you able to find anything?” she asked, a hint of panic in her tone.
“Oh, I found things all right,” Chewie said grimly. “Lots of things. Silver canisters, just like you said, cleverly tucked into crevasses where no one would ever think to look, and hidden under rockfalls disguised to look old, but actually quite recent. I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to bring one up. They’re slowly leaking whatever’s inside—purposefully, I think—and I’m not sure you want to have one on the boat.”
“Drat,” Beka said. “Maybe I can give you a container to get me a sample in, and you could go back down and collect some for me to examine?”
Chewie shook his huge head, scattering more salty water like teardrops. “I don’t think that will be necessary. All the canisters had the same symbol on them; I can draw it for you.”
He took one claw and delicately scratched a triangle into the wooden deck. Inside the triangle, he added a trefoil design of three cones, their wide ends toward the outside edge, and flattened narrower ends meeting around a smaller circle in the middle. “There,” he said. “It looked like that. The background was bright yellow, and the three inside bits were black. There was a black rim around the outside too. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Jesus Christ,” Marcus said, feeling as if all the breath had been sucked out of his lungs.
“It looks kind of familiar,” Beka said, tilting her head sideways to look at it again. “Do you know what it is?” She glanced back at him, her brows drawn together as she clearly saw something on his face that alarmed her. “What is it? Is it really bad?”
Shit, shit, shit. “That’s as bad as it gets, Beka,” he said, glad beyond measure that Chewie had been smart enough not to bring one of those canisters back up with him. “That’s the symbol for hazardous nuclear waste. And if the water in that trench is full of it, it is no wonder all those poor people are sick. They have radiation poisoning.”
He got a sinking feeling in his stomach, looking at her pallor and shadowed eyes. “And I hate to say it, but I think you do too.”
* * *
FOR A MOMENT, panic rose like bile in Beka’s throat, but then she got a grip on herself. He didn’t understand how impossible that was; what it meant to be a Baba Yaga. Fear slowly loosened the claws it had tightened around her heart.
“I believe that radiation poisoning is what is causing the illness in the Selkies and Merpeople,” she said, thinking it out. “That actually makes sense with the vague information I got when I summoned some elementals. And it explains why I couldn’t identify what was wrong with the water. I was looking for some kind of liquid or solid contaminant that had been added to the water; radiation is neither, although whatever is in those containers probably is. No wonder Kesh wanted to stop me from diving and finding them.” She sighed. “But it can’t be what is making me sick.”
“But Beka,” Marcus said. Anxiety and concern etched themselves as deep into his face as Chewie’s claws had etched the deadly symbol into the deck.
“No, really, Marcus,” Beka said. “First of all, the ones who got sick were those actually living in the trench. I never got anywhere near that deep. And even then, those affected are mostly the weakest and most vulnerable; the very young and the very old. As a Baba Yaga, my natural defenses and healing ability are much stronger than the average Human’s. A few dives into the edges of the contaminated water wouldn’t have had any effect on me at all. It has to be something else.”
Chewie shook himself again, transitioning back into his Newfoundland form as he did so. His doggy face wore an expression as close to Marcus’s as their different shapes would allow.
“I don’t know, Beka,” the dragon said doubtfully. “You
first started getting sick right around the time you started looking into the water people’s problem. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“I’m telling you both, it would take a lot more than a superficial dose of radiation to make me feel this sick,” Beka insisted.
“Kesh,” Marcus said, fury transforming him almost as much as Chewie’s change from dragon to dog. “It was that damned Kesh and his fucking picnics by the sea.” His hands clenched and unclenched, as though they could wrap themselves around the absent prince’s neck. “I am going to kill that sonofabitch.”
Beka could feel all the blood drain out of her face. “He couldn’t,” she said. “He wouldn’t.” But she remembered all those times he brought her special bits of fish or lobster, caviar and clams; things he insisted he’d found just for her and refused to share.
Her legs went out from underneath her as the magnitude of his betrayal hit her, and she would have fallen if Marcus hadn’t scooped her up and returned her to the pile of rope they’d been sitting together on so blissfully only a few moments before.
“Great Aphrodite, risen from the sea,” she muttered. “That sonofabitch fed me seafood from the trench and sweet-talked me while he watched me eat poison, all the while trying to convince me to stop looking into the problem. Goddess, I was such a fool!”
“You were trusting and kind,” Marcus said, wrapping his arms around her. “That’s not a bad thing. Hell—it’s one of the things I love about you the most. Kesh is just a slimeball who took advantage of that. That’s his bad, not yours.”
Did Marcus just say he loved me? Sadly, Beka couldn’t bring herself to focus on that right now. Suddenly, she had a thought that perked her up so much she jumped to her feet, leaving Marcus to follow, looking alarmed.
“I’m such an idiot,” she said with a slightly shaky laugh. “We’re freaking out for nothing.”
“We are?” Chewie asked, sounding dubious. “Are you sure? Because I kind of feel like we’re freaking out for something.”
She shook her head. “No, Chewie—you’re forgetting one important thing.”
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