“You would be wise to tread carefully where Beka is concerned,” Kesh said. “She belongs to me.”
The HELL you say, Marcus thought. But out loud, he merely said, “She doesn’t seem to know that. And Beka strikes me as a girl who makes her own decisions.”
Kesh made a low sound in his throat, almost like a growl, as the woman in question bounded up the beach, grinning madly at them both as she rode the high that came from catching a great wave.
“Did you see that?” she yelled, still a few yards away. “I owned that wave! It was amazing! Unbelievable!”
“Leave her to me, fisherman. Or you will regret it.” Kesh strode off toward Beka and pulled her into an exuberant hug.
“Definitely unbelievable,” Marcus muttered to himself. This was not how he’d planned for his morning to go.
THIRTEEN
BEKA SPENT THE next couple of days trying to find answers and getting nowhere.
She called her friend from the university to check in, and see if any of his students could remember whatever results they’d turned up before the fire. That was a frustrating phone call.
“Everything,” Bran said, unhelpfully.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she asked. “How could they have found everything?”
She could practically see the shrug through the phone. “The ocean is a dirty place these days, Beka,” he said. “They found traces of pesticides, petroleum distillates, heavy metals, even radiation.”
“Radiation!” Beka had a vision of herself suddenly glowing in the dark.
Her friend laughed. “They’ve been detecting small amounts of radiation for the last year or so, washed across the Pacific from the Fukushima explosion in Japan. It’s nothing to worry about. My guess is that you haven’t found your ‘ground zero’ yet.”
His voice grew more serious, as he added, “Be careful, Beka. Whatever is causing this, it is clearly capable of creating serious damage in plant and animal life. You may be tougher than the average girl, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be immune to its effects. Maybe you should report this problem to the government and let them take care of it.”
She thanked him, then put the phone down with a bang. If only she could. Unfortunately, the government she reported to had already called in their supposed expert—and she was it.
To make matters worse, both Marcus and Kesh were acting weird. Well, weirder, really.
She’d thought the morning out surfing had gone really well, and Marcus seemed to have a great time. But ever since, he’d been even ruder and more distant than usual, barely speaking to her when they went out on the boat to dive.
And Kesh . . . she had no idea what was going on with Kesh. Suddenly he was everywhere. He showed up in the morning to escort her down to the dock, saying that then she didn’t have to find a parking spot for the Karmann Ghia (like she couldn’t tuck the tiny car into a corner and then hide it with magic so she wouldn’t get a ticket), and then came to get her when she was done for the day. He carried her diving gear for her as if she were a schoolgirl, and brought her little gifts like flowers or some ancient trinket he’d found on the bottom of the sea.
Their sunset picnics on the beach seemed to have become an every night affair too. She knew she should be grateful for his attention—he was a prince, after all, and a very handsome one at that—but she was getting to the point where she missed her quiet nights burning marshmallows by a bonfire with Chewie in front of the bus.
But she couldn’t figure out a way to tell Kesh she wanted a night off from his company without hurting his feelings (or offending his royal father, which would have been worse). So she spent her mornings with a grumpy ex-Marine and her evenings with a too-charming Selkie, and she was rapidly becoming sick of it all.
In fact, she just felt sick in general. She blamed too much diving, deeper than was truly comfortable even for her, and too much rich food at her nightly banquets-by-the-sea. Not to mention too many nights spent wide awake and staring at the paneled ceiling of the bus, trying to figure out what she was going to do if she couldn’t solve this problem and live up to her title as Baba Yaga. Or if she even wanted to be Baba Yaga at all. Her thirtieth birthday was rapidly approaching, and she still hadn’t made a decision. Although she’d skipped her last couple of doses of the Water of Life and Death, mostly because she just didn’t feel like she deserved to drink the rich and magical elixir that kept her young and boosted her magical ability.
* * *
KESH SAT IN the battered wooden chair as though it were a throne, his black silk shirt and expensive linen pants as out of place in the dingy, crowded office as an orchid in a field of dandelions. On the walls, faded maps of fishing routes were interspersed with photos of numerous generations of men in boats, men showing off gigantic fish, and the exterior of the building when it was new and shiny and proud.