Wickedly Wonderful (Baba Yaga, #2)(66)
His father’s face turned red, and then white, but Marcus couldn’t seem to stop himself from shouting. “Now I come halfway across the world to help you when you’re sick, and you’ll let me haul in fish with the hired help, but you won’t let me actually do anything to make this easier on you. I could fix up the boat, but you won’t let me. I could buy you a new net, but then you’d have to admit you needed me for something, and you’d rather go broke and give it all up than take anything from me.”
He kicked the net, causing more bits and pieces to subside into ruin. “Did you really think I didn’t realize you were broke? The harbormaster came to me days ago, asking for his back docking fees.”
“Well, I hope you didn’t pay them,” his da shouted back. “Them’s my debts, and I’ll pay them myself.”
“How?” Marcus asked. “Beka’s not coming back to give you any more bags of salvaged coins. Your net is in shreds. How do you expect to pay your debts if you can’t fish?”
“Beka’s not coming back?” his father said, looking shocked, and surprisingly unhappy. “What did you do, boy?”
Marcus felt a sudden desire to revert to childhood and stamp his feet on the worn deck. “What makes you think it was me that did something? Did it not occur to you that maybe your precious Beka was the one at fault?”
Across the way, Chico and Kenny exchanged glances.
“She lied to me,” Marcus said stubbornly, as though someone were arguing with him. “She wasn’t who she said she was at all.” He wasn’t going to mention that his da had been right about mystical creatures actually existing—not only would that give the old man something more to feel superior about, but Marcus was still doing his best to pretend he’d never learned the truth about dragons and Selkies and Mermaids. Oh my.
Marcus Senior shook his head. “You’re as big a fool as I am, boy,” he said in a marginally quieter voice. “I lost your mother because I was too prideful to go after her when she left. Don’t you make the same mistake I did. That Beka, she’s one in a million. Even I like her, and that’s saying something.”
Chico snorted into his mustache. Marcus glared at them both.
“She’s gone, and she’s not coming back. You’d better just get used to the idea.” Like he would—any day now. “And in the meantime, you still need a new net, and I’m going to go get you one. So you’d better get used to that idea too.”
The old man opened his mouth, but Marcus didn’t wait around to see what he had to say, striding off to the front of the boat and taking the wheel to steer them back into shore. The sooner he got off this boat and away from his father, the better. There was a beer at the Cranky Seagull with his name on it. And if there was any luck left in his life at all, it would have brought plenty of its relatives.
TWENTY
“BEKA. BEKA. YOU should get up and see this.”
Chewie’s voice was like a hammer beating against the anvil of her headache. The sun peeking through the blinds provided the flames for the forge. She wasn’t asleep; hadn’t slept much at all, lately. Some of it was worry, of course. And feeling like crap. But most of it was missing Marcus like crazy.
You would think they’d been together forever, the way she missed him, instead of just spending a couple of weeks on the same boat, and one brief moment of passion together. Before it all blew up in her face. And yet, she ached for him. Half a dozen times in the last couple of days, she’d almost swallowed her pride and gone to him. Begged him to listen. To understand. But what was the point? They came from two different worlds. There was no way their separate stories could share the same ending.
“Beka.” Sharp teeth tugged at the long tee shirt she slept in. “Are you getting up? There’s something on TV you need to see.”
Beka brushed away tears with a hand that shook and tried to paste a disgruntled expression on her face as she rolled over to face her dragon-dog. “Fine, I’m coming. But if this is another rerun of The Lord of the Rings, I don’t want to hear about how Smaug isn’t really a bad guy at heart.”
Chewie shook his massive head, not at all convinced by her show of normalcy, but clearly willing to let it slide. For now, anyway.
“No, it’s the local news. Not nearly as much fun as Lord of the Rings, but almost as educational.”
Beka forced herself to get out of bed, ignoring her pounding head and churning stomach. She followed Chewie into the living room, where the TV showed a chipper blond weather girl predicting warm weather and no rain. What a surprise. Beka spun her hand counterclockwise, and the scene on the television rewound slowly.
“Stop there!” Chewie demanded, settling down on his haunches.
Beka snapped her fingers, and the picture started moving forward again at normal speed, showing the news from a few minutes before. A perky female reporter, nearly identical to the one who’d been doing the weather, stood on a dock with a microphone and an intently serious expression.
“We have multiple reports of odd occurrences out here at the harbor,” she said, showing a lot of very white teeth and very tanned cleavage. “Some of the fishermen have told me that their nets are being chewed up and destroyed in a way that none of them has ever seen before. A couple of men I talked to claim to have seen mythical creatures, such as Mermaids or sea serpents, and one even insisted that some kind of mysterious force is responsible for this season’s poor fishing.”